Abstract—Latin America has often been depicted as one of
the most unequal regions in the world. However, after the rising
of inequality, the figure declines dramatically starting from the
year 2000. In this setting, Bolivia has been one of the poorest
performers on income distribution efforts, lately, this situation
has been improving. The author investigates the dynamics of
this change through an analysis of household level surveys for 4
different years (2003/04, 2005, 2008 and 2009). The research
applies a method of inequality decomposition – as developed by
G.S. Fields in 2003; this technique consists on regressing the
expenditure of households against a vector of explanatory
variables. The results suggest that education (more than other
variables) has contributed on the reduction of inequality in
Bolivia. Moreover, the sources of inequality are mainly
attributed to the differences on human capital accumulation
more than any other variables, such as the gender of the
household head or the ethnical origin of the household. The
results are in line with similar work made by other authors on
the same issue.
Index Terms—Bolivia, Economic Development, Income
Distribution, Inequality.
Jonathan M. Fortun Vargas is with Graduate School of International
Cooperation Studies, Kobe University, Japan (e-mail:
fortun@stu.kobe-u.ac.jp).
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Cite:Jonathan M. Fortun Vargas, "The Sources of Inequality in Bolivia," International Journal of Trade, Economics and Finance vol.3, no.5, pp. 374-380, 2012.