La distribución de ingresos y rentas en América Latina durante el siglo XX: un estudio inicial

Abstract

Latin America has the most unequal income distribution of any region in the world, yet its historical causes are poorly understood. This paper reports the first exploratory attempt to compute income distributions for the five leading Latin American economies for the whole twentieth century. The methodology produces estimates of factor income dispersion for four skill groups over 19002000, which can be used to generate Gini coefficients. Large fluctuations in dispersion over time are found: countering claims of stability since the colonial past in the recent economic institutions literature; but supporting the findings of economic historians and development economists. A set of explanatory variables (reflecting the impact of international trade, labour quality and macroeconomic imbalances) are tested. The resulting estimation model explains the data well, with all three sets of drivers proving significant; although the measured effects are different across the five countries. The paper concludes that the skill composition of the workforce not only underpins long run trends in functional income distribution as conceived by Kuznets; but also conditions fluctuations in response to exogenous shocks.