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The authors analyze the ownership and use of income-generating assets, as well as access to them. Where there are market imperfections, they propose policies to ease the constraints faced by the poor in accumulating the human, physical and social capital they need to generate greater income."--BOOK JACKET.

The effects of market reforms on poverty and inequality in Latin America have been of considerable concern. The region continues to have relatively great income inequalities. But measures of income inequality based on cross-sectional annual data are "snapshots." Two different societies with the same "snapshots" of income distribution may have different levels of social welfare because they have different degrees of social mobility. In this paper we address the question whether the reforms of the last decade, implemented in various degrees in different countries, have affected mobility across generations. We analyze the effects of macroeconomic conditions and education policies on intergenerational mobility, using data from 28 household surveys, covering 16 countries over the years 1980-1996.

The Human Development Index (HDI) improves upon per capita GDP as an indicator of development by incorporating information on health and education. However, like its predecessor, it fails to account for the inequality with which the benefits of development are distributed among the population. Subsequent work by Anand and Sen (1993) and Hicks (1997) has led to a useful distribution-sensitive measure of human development, but at the cost of a key property of the HDI that ensures consistency between regional and aggregate analyses. This paper presents a new parametric class of human development indices that includes the original HDI as well as a family of distribution sensitive indices that satisfy all the basic properties for an index of human development. An empirical application using the year 2000 Mexican Population Census data shows how the new measures can be applied to analyze the distribution of human development at the national level and for individual states.

Covers the 1980s and 1990s.