Falling Inequality in Latin America: Policy Changes and Lessons, edited by Giovanni AndreaCornia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN 978‐0‐19‐870180‐4, £60.00 (h/b), pp. 370.)

Abstract

Latin American countries have experienced a sizeable and unparalleled decline in income inequality over the past decade, after a process of market liberalization and privatization that began in the late 1970s and the subsequent structural adjustment programmes under the Washington Consensus. Falling inequality in Latin America is a collection of essays that aim to document and explain such a trend. The main fact permeating the structure of the book is the widespread improvement in income distribution in the majority of countries of the region, even in the presence of different institutional and economic structures, and during a period of increasing globalization and openness. To explain such a fact, the analysis proceeds by firstly assessing the inequality changes occurred in some Latin American countries representative of the political and socio-economic heterogeneity characterizing the region during the past decades, and then by interpreting them in a broader regional perspective.The volume is organized as follows. Part I focuses on the main political and socio-economic changes that have accompanied the fall in inequality during the 2000s, providing a preliminary outline of the causes that might have determined such a trend. More specifically, Chapter 1 offers a general description of the inequality pattern in Latin America during the past decade and provides an overview of the topics addressed by the chapters of the book and of their main findings. Chapter 2 widens the analysis by looking at previous decades in order to better contextualize the pattern of inequality over a longer period. By using regression analysis, the chapter tests the distributive impact of some of the main factors that might have contributed to the recent decline in inequality. Chapter 3 recalls the most significant phases of the political development of Latin America over the recent decades, highlighting the re-politicization of the social issues of inequality and poverty that took place from the late 1990s, together with the return to democracy in many countries and the renewed attention of the political agenda to redistributive policies and reforms.Part II analyses the recent trends in income inequality with specific reference to six Latin American countries. The section is divided into six chapters, each dedicated to a country case study. Specifically, for each country, the observed inequality changes are firstly decomposed into changes in the shares of different types of income and in their concentration coefficients (proximate determinants); then, the factors influencing the changes in income composition and concentration (underlying determinants) are investigated. The key finding of Part II is that the pattern of the overall income inequality has been driven mostly by labour income inequality, which in turn has been influenced by changes in the skill premium, whose determinants are studied with respect to each country.More specifically, Chapters 4 and 5 focus on Ecuador and Chile, two countries run by centreleft governments during ...