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After the so-called structural reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, most Latin American countries had shown that they could achieve fast growth and deal with structural change. However, income per capita failed to converge on the world leaders, and growth was followed by increasing inequality and, in some parts of Latin America, even increasing poverty. Noting this experience, observers began to wonder whether inequality had become a permanent feature of Latin American development and whether it had contributed to the region’s disappointing long-run development performance (Bértola et al. 2010a).

This chapter presents a new consistent yearly estimate of gross income (between-group) inequality Ginis for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela over the period 1900–2011, using a newly assembled wage dataset for three occupational categories. The approach used differentiates labour by skill level and allows for changing allocation of the labour force over time. Property income is calculated as a residual. Our regional Gini shows a changing secular process with a reclined “S” shape with an inflection point around 1940 and a peak in the 1990s. There are mixed country trends in the early and middle decades, but in most cases inequality was on the rise in the 1960s. There was also a tendency for narrowing wage inequality in the middle decades of the last century but whose impact was more than offset by a rising share of the top income group. Inequality in the twentieth century is a story of increased polarisation—particularly post-1970—amid significant social mobility.

This chapter is a synthesis of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation. It studies the relationship between income inequality and development process in Chile between 1850 and 2009. It aims to describe and explain the tendencies in income distribution over time signaling their causes and some of their consequences. The main contributions of the dissertation and this chapter are the estimates of historical series for salaries, wages, and different measures of income distribution, including Gini index, Theil, labor share, and the income of the top 1 %. These estimates relied on the methodology of “social tables,” which aggregates income earners in categories such as occupation, having estimated the number of recipients and their earnings for each category every year between 1860 and 1970. In spite of the problems arising from the use of assumptions to obtain an annual estimate, these social tables allow medium- and long-run trends with relative confidence. The chapter makes two major contributions. First, it shows the potential of in-depth case studies as a means to analyze the relationship between development and inequality. Second, it avoids oversimplification. Most studies tend to focus on a single factor and analyze the impact on inequality in a timeless or a historical manner. But, as this work shows, trends in inequality are always the consequence of economic, social, political, and institutional factors which interact, so that each one reinforces or overrides the influence of the other. The combination of these factors, which is an outcome of the historical process, is what determines the trends in inequality over time.

This chapter presents the evolution of biological standards of living of the Mexican population during the period 1850–1986. By analyzing the Mexican case, we argue that average adult stature of a population can be used as an indicator of human well-being that is sensitive to inequality. In the present study, results suggest a persistent inequality pattern when height trends are compared across social classes and regions. For the first 100 years we examine data drawn from military and passport records. The remainder years are analyzed with data taken from the 2000 Mexican National Health Survey (ENSA-2000) and the 2006 and 2012 Mexican National Survey on Health and Nutrition (ENSANUT-2006, ENSANUT-2012).

We estimate a measure of long-run development in Mexico by calculating a human development index for the period 1895-2010. This index is calculated using urbanization rates, measures of schooling, and number of physicians per capita for each state in Mexico. This is the longest homogenous series to date that compares development at the national and state levels. We find a significant increase in human development over the period studied; however, divergence across states increased through 1940 and then decreased substantially. Perhaps more significantly, development patterns across states exhibit a strong persistence over time. Northern states have been wealthier than the rest from the beginning of the period, while southern states are the poorest. The states surrounding Mexico City were as poor as the southern states at the beginning of the twentieth century, but experienced accelerated development from 1940 to 1980.

In this chapter, we present evidence on the relationship between inequality and long-term development using data on different Brazilian regions. Our empirical approach is developed within a constant institutional environment—Brazil—accounting for possible differences in the de facto institutional environments (Brazilian states) rooted in distinct colonial experiences. New inequality indicators are constructed from scratch for Brazilian municipalities in 1920. Our econometric analysis indicates a positive robust relationship between economic inequality and long-term development indicators for Southeastern states (São Paulo, the center of coffee production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a state with a large influx of European immigrants, which became the most dynamic Brazilian state; and Minas Gerais, the center of the gold cycle, shaped also by cattle farming and coffee production); no significant relationship for Pernambuco (a Northeastern state, representative of the old agrarian structure of colonial sugar plantations); and a positive relationship for Rio Grande do Sul (a Southern state, with a colonial experience more similar to that of the USA and Canada). We found no evidence of a robust relationship between the percentage of eligible voters and long-term development, a surprising result in light of the evidence provided in development literature, but likely consistent with a politically captured system with very low levels of enfranchisement.

The chapter provides historical perspectives on spatial economic inequalities in Brazil making use of a database on Brazilian municipalities from 1872 to 2000. A suite of maps and graphs describe the geographic factors shaping the historical development of the Brazilian economy highlighting the role of transport costs and its consequences for the spatial dynamics of income per capita and labor productivity. The remaining of the chapter estimates econometric models of growth convergence for municipal income per capita and labor productivity. From 1920 onwards analyses are refined, firstly, by disaggregating the models for urban and rural activities; secondly, by assuming spatial correlation among variables of the model; and, thirdly, by enlarging the model to take account of the long-run determinants of spatial growth convergence. Empirical results endorse the historical preeminence of geographic factors—in particular accessibility and transport conditions—as opposed to institutional conditions. The conclusion summarizes the results and proposes research extensions.

Brazil has come nearer to equality among races; yet the breach between black and white remains wide. This chapter considers racial inequality in the period after independence (1822), encompassing the abolition of slavery (1888). The social construction of race and its historiography are discussed, and new time series are presented on life expectancy, literacy, schooling, occupation, and income for Afro-Brazilian, white, Asian, and indigenous peoples. There has been major, albeit uneven, progress in these terms since slavery, which has unfortunately not wholly translated into equality of income: only in 2010 did the black-to-white income ratio eclipsed its 1960 level, although it appears to be at an all-time high. Education and migration were important factors in closing the gap, whereas school quality and discrimination may explain its persistence. The post-abolition era has received much attention, but long-run data on racial outcomes are scarce.

This chapter aims at analyzing whether educational spending in Bolivia fits well into the regional description or, by contrast, changed radically and took distance from the Latin American pattern after the 1952 Revolution. Taking advantage of new quantitative evidence, the chapter stresses that the Revolution did not imply, in the long term, a substantial modification of the quality and redistributive character of the Bolivian education system. Four main findings support this claim: public spending in education was hardly sustainable over time; education spending, controlled by pc GDP, was not outstanding by international standards; the inexistence of a substantial support to primary education may have reduced the redistributive impact of education spending; and education outputs, either in quantity or quality terms, were often among the worse in the region.

The labour market experienced in the last four decades a great change in its composition through the increasing of female labour force. In most of the Latin American countries during this period a huge increase of women participation in the urban labour market took place (, 16th World Economic History Congress, 2012). The female labour force participation began to increase in the 1970s, and continued into the 1980s, and in the 1990s the region saw a significant improvement. From the 1960s Argentine, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile passed of a female participation rate of around 20 % to 40–50 % in 2000.

This change can be explained among other things by a process of technological advance and increase of human capital that allow to replace domestic or informal work by paid work. This change impacts on the labour market by increasing the supply of labour and increasing inequality between workers given that a gender gap persists.

In Latina America the more recent studies of income distribution show heterogeneity between the countries (, World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004). We think that this topic highlighted the necessity of decomposition of inequality to understand the driving forces behind inequality over time.

The main goal of the research is to test the hypothesis that the evolution of the gender wage gap is an important component in global inequality and it has non-linear effects. Although this gap has narrowed in recent decades it is still wide, especially in the Latin American countries where inequality is high and where the incorporation of women into the labour force has lagged behind the developed countries.