Noah Smith über die sinkende Ungleichheit in Lateinamerika
Warum ist die Ungleichheit überhaupt so hoch?
One possibility is that global economic geography forced Latin America into becoming a commodity exporter instead of a manufacturing nation. Because the region has so much farmland and so many valuable minerals, and because it’s relatively sparsely populated and far from the world’s main industrial clusters in Asia and Europe, developing manufacturing was hard. Only a couple of Latin American countries — Mexico and El Salvador — have managed to specialize in manufacturing. This could have limited the scope for institutions like unions and labor laws to equalize the distribution of income, as well as robbing Latin American governments of the incentive to improve education (which would raise human capital and middle-class wages).
Warum ist die Ungleichheit gesunken?
What about progressive transfers? The authors find that although increased redistribution does account for maybe 17% of the drop in inequality from 2000 to 2012, the biggest factor by far was a reduction in pretax wage inequality, explaining 62% of the decline. In other words, the poor and middle class started earning more money in Latin America in 2000-2012.
Why did that happen? Lustig et al. examine a number of studies that try to figure out the cause of declining wage inequality in various Latin American countries over this period. The progressive state does get a bit of the credit, since some Latin American countries raised minimum wage, and a few boosted the power of labor unions. But inequality also fell in countries that didn’t do these things.
What did affect pretty much every country in the region, however, were two things: 1) faster economic growth, and 2) increased education.
Lustig et al. estimate that from 2000 to 2012, faster economic growth was responsible for the lion’s share of the growth in the Latin American middle class, and for a majority of poverty reduction as well. This wasn’t true in all countries, though; in some, redistribution mattered more.
Es war eine Mischung aus Wirtschaftswachstum und Umverteilung in Kombination mit besserer Bildung.
In the 90s and 00s, Latin America made big strides in school completion at both the secondary and tertiary levels. Pretty much every country got a lot better-educated.
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