Race and income distribution: Evidence from the US, Brazil and South Africa

The aim of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence about black-white differentials in the distribution of income and wellbeing in three different countries: Brazil, US and South Africa. In all cases, people of African descent are in a variety of ways socially disadvantaged compared with the relatively more affluent whites. We investigate the extent of these gaps in comparative perspective, and analyze to what degree they can be explained by differences in the observed characteristics of races, such as where they live, the types of household they have, or their performance in the labor market. We undertake this analysis with the Oaxaca-Blinder approach at the means and with the DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux approach at the entire distribution. Our results show how the factors underlying the racial divide vary across countries and income quantiles.racial inequalities, income distribution, United States, Brazil, South Africa.

Conditional occupational segregation of minorities in the U.S.

In this paper, we use a propensity score-based methodology to analyze the role of demographic and human capital characteristics of minorities in the U.S. in explaining their high occupational segregation with respect to whites. Thus, we measure conditional segregation based on an estimated counterfactual distribution in which minorities are given the relevant characteristics of whites. Our results show that the different levels of attained education by ethnicity and race explain a substantial share of occupational segregation of non-whites in the U.S., while English skills or immigration status are especially relevant for explaining segregation among Hispanics and Asians.conditional occupational segregation, race and ethnicity, United States.

Race, poverty, and deprivation in South Africa

The aim of this paper is to explain why poverty and material deprivation in South Africa are significantly higher among those of African descent than among whites. To do so, we estimate the conditional levels of poverty and deprivation Africans would experience had they the same characteristics as whites. By comparing the actual and counterfactual distributions, we show that the racial gap in poverty and deprivation can be attributed to the cumulative disadvantaged characteristics of Africans, such as their current level of educational attainment, demographic structure, and area of residence, as well as to the inertia of past racial inequalities. Progress made in the educational and labor market outcomes of Africans after Apartheid explains the reduction in the racial poverty differential.poverty, deprivation, race, decomposition, South Africa, households’ characteristics.

Income distribution and income sources in Uruguay

This paper is concerned with changes in the distribution of income sources in Uruguay after the late eighties. An apparent stability in the distribution of total incomes is hiding deep transformations affecting the generation of that income. The distribution across all income earners at the end of the eighties exhibited two well-distinguished poles, each associated with one of the main income sources: pension benefits and wages. This bimodality diminished during the nineties due to the reduction in polarization by income sources. In the same period we find that in the case of labor earnings there was a net transfer of population mass from the middle of the distribution to both extremes, which results in an increasing polarization within this income source. This phenomenon resembles the Anglo-Saxon experience of the shrinking middle class.income sources, inequality, labor market, pension benefits, polarization

Segregation of women into low-paying occupations in the United States

We extend the conventional framework for measuring segregation to consider stratification of occupations by gender, i.e. when women or men are predominantly segregated into low-paying jobs. For this, we propose to use concentration curves and indices. Our empirical analysis using this approach shows that the decline over time in occupational gender segregation in the US has been accompanied by a deeper, longer reduction in gender stratification. We further investigate the role of workers' characteristics, showing that gender differences cannot explain the levels of segregation/stratification in any year. However, changes over time for each gender do help to explain their trends

Why is poverty so high among Afro-Brazilians? a decomposition analysis of the racial poverty gap

This study aimed to identify the major factors underlying the large discrepancy in poverty levels between two Brazilian racial groups: whites and Afro-Brazilians. We performed an Oaxaca-Blinder-type decomposition for nonlinear regressions in order to quantify the extent to which differences in observed geographic, sociodemographic, and labor characteristics (characteristics effect) account for this difference. The remaining unexplained part (coefficients effect) provides evidence on how these characteristics differentially impact on the risk of poverty in each group. A detailed decomposition of both effects allows the individual contribution of each characteristic to be determined. Our results show that the characteristics effect explains a large part of the discrepancy in poverty levels, with education and labor variables of household members explaining at least one half of the effect, and geographic and demographic variables accounting for the remainder. However, the unexplained part that remains significant has increased in importance in recent last years, and probably results from unequal access to high-quality education and the persistence of discrimination against colored workers in the labor market

Poverty and ethnicity in Asian countries

This paper compares the extent and the nature of the higher prevalence of poverty among disadvantaged ethnic groups in six Asian countries using demographic surveys. We first estimate a composite wealth index as a proxy for economic status, and analyze the magnitude of the ethnic gap in absolute and relative poverty levels across six countries and different ethnicities in those countries. Then, we use regression-based counterfactual analysis for explaining these ethnic differentials in poverty. We compare the actual differential in poverty with the gap that remains after disadvantaged ethnic groups are given the distribution of characteristics of the advantaged ones (by reweighting their densities using propensity scores). Our results show that there is a substantial cross-country variability in the extension, evolution, and nature of the ethnic poverty gap, which is as high as 50 percentage points or more in some specific cases in Nepal, Pakistan, or India. The gap in the latter country increased over the analyzed period, while it was reduced in the Philippines. Our analyses indicate that factors that contribute to ethnic disadvantaged groups being poorer are the strongly persistent high inequalities in education (e.g., India, Nepal, and Pakistan), in regional development (e.g., the Philippines) and the large urban-rural gap (e.g., Pakistan)

Are Children in Growing Danger of Social Exclusion? Evidence from Italy and Spain

In this paper, we claim that children are in danger of social exclusion both in Italy and in Spain since social distance between age groups has increased over time. We use as a measure of social exclusion an index of polarization since neither the Lorenz-consistent inequality indices nor the measures of poverty are suited to this task. We look for the causes of this phenomenon by grouping children according to some characteristics of the household to which they belong. Our last aim is to measure the effects that government intervention has had on this phenomenon. We focus on public provisions of education and health care. One of the main findings is that public intervention was not at all successful in fighting this phenomenon, since welfare state institutions of the two countries were designed to combat risks associated with old age and not with childhood

Occupational segregation by race in South Africa after apartheid

This paper investigates progress in reducing the high level of racial stratification of occupations after apartheid in South Africa. Empirical analysis, using census microdata and Labour Force Surveys, does not provide strong evidence of sustained or significant desegregation. Occupations remain highly segmented by race, with blacks disproportionally holding low-paying jobs (compared with whites). Less than a third of segregation and about half of racial stratification in occupational distribution are related to blacks' characteristics, especially their lower educational achievement, a gap that has been reduced over time. Segregation and stratification, however, remain when blacks and whites with similar characteristics are compared

The measurement of gender wage discrimination: The distributional approach revisited

This paper presents the advantages of taking into account the distribution of the individual wage gap when analyzing female wage discrimination. The limitations of previous approaches such as the classic Oaxaca-Blinder and the recent distributive proposals using quantile regressions or counterfactual functions are thoroughly discussed. The new methodology presented here relies on Jenkins' (1994) work and proposes the use of poverty and deprivation literature techniques that are directly applicable to the measurement of discrimination. In an empirical application, we quantify the relevance of the glass ceiling and sticky floor phenomena in the Spanish labor market.children distributive analysis, economics of gender, wage discrimination, glass ceiling, sticky floor.