Inequality Bands: Seventy-five years of measuring income inequality in Latin America

We take the issues as understood and report a very small number of indicators, namely the Gini coefficient and the shares of different segments in the distribution, such as the bottom 50%, the next 40%, the top 10% and the top 1%. [...] Most studies of income distribution in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s systematically attempted to present their results in the context of the estimation of national income, or of input-output matrices, or as the result of the information provided by population censuses.11 In Argentina, for example, in parallel with the establishment of the system of national accounts, CONADE-CEPAL (1965) set out to e. [...] The merging point is the maximum point at which the ratios of the cumulative density function in survey and tax records and the ratio of the density function in survey and tax records are equal. [...] The bad sequence of common shocks that hit Latin America from the late 1970s to the early 1990s seems rather obvious: the oil price rises in the 1970s; the subsequent increased indebtedness; growing inflationary pressures and slowdown of economic activity; the debt crisis triggered by the rise of interest rates in 1982; the severe recession that followed; and the IMF-led macroeconomic adjustments. [...] Coming back to our initial question, what explains the inverted U shape of the evolution of inequality and then the more recent disruptions of the declining trend in LAC countries? The multiplicity of causes of change mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, and the partial evidence collected on practically all of them by researchers and analysts for specific countries and periods, illustrate the di.