Tulane University

New from Brookings Institution Press: Declining Inequality in Latin America: A Decade of Progress?
Luis F. López-Calva & Nora Lustig, eds.
Copublished with the United Nations Development Programme

Book review by Foreign Affairs, a Council of Foreign Relations publication:
Latin America is infamous for its yawning gaps between the very rich and the very poor. It is big news, therefore, that this deeply entrenched disgrace is showing signs of reversal. Over the last decade, according to the number-crunching economists assembled in this book, inequality measurably declined in 12 of 17 countries. The volume attributes this to two factors: the massive expansion of elementary schooling during the past decades, which narrowed the earnings gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers, and carefully targeted government programs that transferred cash to the poor. (Democratization has helped, too.) The persistence of this redistributive momentum will depend, the editors contend, on progressive tax reforms. This is an important, evidence-rich study that directly challenges the notion that globalization inevitably widens income gaps in developing nations.

• ‘€œIn this excellent book, López-Calva, Lustig, and their outstanding team of authors do not shy away from the complexity inherent in the interaction of economics, policy, and politics that lay behind changes in the distribution of incomes.‘€
  —Francisco H. G. Ferreira
  Deputy Chief Economist for Latin America, World Bank

• ‘€œA work of both exceptional scholarship and practical policy assessment on Latin America‘€™s most intractable, and potentially explosive, challenge—the massive income and wealth inequality that characterizes most countries of the region. ‘€
  —Peter Hakim
  President, Inter-American Dialogue

• ‘€œThis very important book…will be of great interest to anyone concerned with issues of social development in Latin America, including
  economists, political scientists, and the policy community.‘€
  —Robert Kaufman
  Rutgers University

• ‘€œAn excellent and necessary book that will be welcomed by all interested in Latin America‘€™s development.‘€
  —Santiago Levy
  Vice-President, Inter-American Development Bank

Luis F. López-Calva is chief economist at the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics at Tulane University and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C.

2010 — 253 pages
paperback – $34.95
special discount price – $27.96

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