Download Free Social Transfers The Household And The Distribution Of Incomes In Chile Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Social Transfers The Household And The Distribution Of Incomes In Chile and write the review.

With the profound political and economic changes of the 1970s and 1980s behind it, and regardless of its trade patterns, Chile's income distribution is, for the moment, calm. Education may be the most important variable affecting the structure of, and changes in, inequality in Chile. After rising in the 1960s, falling in the early 1970s, and rising again from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, income inequality seems to have stabilized in Chile since about 1987. With the stormy period of economic and political reform of the 1970s and 1980s well over, no statistically significant Lorenz dominance results could be detected after 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 compensated for by a stretching at the top. As inequality remained broadly stable, sustained economic growth led to substantial 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. An examination of the factors underlying these trends suggests that an equilibrium has (for the moment) been reached between rising demand for and supply of skills-the demand for skills associated with technological progress and the supply of skills associated with expansion of education. Chile's trading pattern might well be tangential to its recent distributional dynamics. This paper-a product of the Poverty Reduction Group, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network-is part of a larger effort in the network to understand income distribution dynamics in developing countries. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Poverty and Income Distribution Dynamics in a High Growth Economy: The Case of Chile, 1987-94 (RPO 681-59). Francisco H.G. Ferreira may be contacted at [email protected].
Chile has benefited from strong growth and well targeted social programs over recent years that have resulted in a reduction of poverty at all income levels. In analyzing the progress in poverty reduction made in Chile, the different dimensions of poverty, including income and access to social services are reviewed. This World Bank report updates information on development in Chile through a focus on the years 1994 - 1998. It has developed and applied a methodology for the estimate of the imputed income transfers from government subsidies in health, education, and housing for the years 1990, 1994, 1996, and 1998. Access to social services, demonstrated by reduced infant mortality, increased life expectancy, and housing availability, have shown significant improvements in the evaluation period. Despite this achievement, income inequality remains relatively high and unemployment, among younger and poorer workers, is a severe problem.
We aim to provide a broad descriptive overview of Chile’s social issues, in comparison to other countries and over time, in order to place the recent social unrest in historical and international perspectives which can help prepare the ground for future policy priorities. We follow an eclectic approach, classifying a broad set of indicators along six dimensions—inequality across: i) income; ii) perception; iii) access; iv) opportunity; v) redistribution; and vi) location. The analysis puts forward a set of descriptive findings. First, income inequality declined substantially but remains high, also compared to countries with similar level and path of development. Second, Chile seems to be one of the few countries in Latin America with declining inequality where perceived inequality actually increased. Third, notwithstanding an increase in social spending, access to essential services appears limited, particularly for middle and lower income classes, amid fast growth of out-of-pocket health expenses, relatively faster growth of cost of living for the relatively poorer, and remaining weaknesses in the pension and education systems. Fourth, inequality of opportunity is high, with limited competition. Fifth, fiscal redistribution has improved markedly, but remains low by international standards. Finally, inter-regional inequality has declined substantially over the last two decades, reaching levels similar to the OECD median.
The study analyzes Chile's strong economic growth, and well directed social programs, a combination that reduced the poverty rate in half, during a period of just eleven years. The previously noted trends in falling poverty, in terms of incidence, depth, and severity, continued into 1998, and the analysis shows there was unambiguously less poverty between 1994, and 1998, observed at all levels of income. Clearly, income poverty is related to, and impacted by a number of important factors, such as level of education, larger families, or families headed by women, and employment opportunities. Evidence shows Chile achieved considerable improvements in key social indicators, i.e., infant mortality, life expectancy, and educational coverage, for the combination of the three social sector deficit measures of poverty - education, health, and housing - with the income poverty measure, reveals that fifty one percent of all households have neither social sector, nor income deficits. Nonetheless, income inequality remained high by international standards, and appeared to have worsened between 1994-98. Thus, adjusting income inequality for social spending became an important estimate, particularly if social programs were growing. The methodology estimated imputed income transfers from subsidies in the three sectors, and the analysis confirmed that adjustments for in-kind income transfers, substantially reduce the Gini coefficient on income inequality. Results indicate that Chile's success in reducing income disparities through social spending is linked to its system for targeting social programs.
This is the eighth edition of Society at a Glance, with 25 indicators in total, and data for the 34 OECD member countries and select key partners (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa) and other G20 countries (Argentina and Saudi Arabia).