The Microeconomics of Income Distribution Dynamics in East Asia and Latin America

Economists have had much to say about what causes aggregate economic growth, but they have been more reticent about the distributional dimension of that growth. To understand development and the process of poverty reduction requires understanding not only how total income grows, but also how its distribution behaves over time. 'The Microeconomics of Income Distribution Dynamics in East Asia and Latin America' is a major new contribution to that process. The authors propose a decomposition of differences in entire distributions of household incomes, shedding new light on the powerful, and often conflicting, forces that underpin the changes in poverty and inequality that accompany the process of economic development. This approach is applied to three East Asian countries--Indonesia, Malaysia, and China--and to four in Latin America--Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.