Calm after the Storms: Income Distribution and Welfare in Chile, 1987-94

After rising during most--but not all--of the 1960-85 period, inequality in Chile seems to have stabilized since around 1987. Following the stormy period of economic and political reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, no statistically significant Lorenz dominance results could be detected since 1987. Scalar measures of inequality confirm this picture of stability, but suggest a slight change in the shape of the density function, with some compression at the bottom being "compensated for" by a stretching at the top. As inequality remained broadly stable, sustained economic growth led to substantial welfare improvements and poverty reduction, according to a range of measures and with respect to three different poverty lines. Poverty mixed stochastic dominance tests confirm this result. All of these findings are robust to different choices of equivalence scales. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.