Earnings Mobility in Times of Growth and Decline: Argentina from 1996 to 2003

In recent years, the economy of Argentina has experienced both rapid economic growth and severe economic decline. In this paper, we use a series of one-year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most in pesos when the economy contracted. Various considerations led us to expect that mobility would be divergent—that is, that the individuals who started with the highest initial earnings would enjoy the largest earnings gains in pesos. Contrary to expectations and for a wide range of specifications, mobility is found to be mostly convergent, sometimes neutral, and never divergent. We then demonstrate how generally rising inequality and convergent mobility can be reconciled. Thus, the panel data analysis performed in this paper presents a picture of economic growth that is much more pro-poor than what one gets from cross-sectional inequality comparisons

How Is Convergent Mobility Consistent with Rising Inequality? A Reconciliation in the Case of Argentina

[Excerpt] This is a paper on earnings mobility in Argentina during the macroeconomic growth and contractions that have characterized that nation’s economy from 1996 to the present. Since 1996, real GDP growth has fluctuated widely. For most of the 1990s, Argentina was seen as a model of successful policymaking. Having pegged its exchange rate to the dollar under a currency board type arrangement in 1991, Argentina had succeeded in ending hyperinflation, reducing inflation rates to single-digit levels. Greater economic stability attracted foreign investment inflows, contributing to an acceleration in economic growth; indeed, even as lenders withdrew their financing in East Asia in 1997, capital inflows continued to Argentina. Then, Argentina entered into a prolonged recession. The combination of the hard peg of the local currency to the U.S. dollar and excessive borrowing led to an unsustainable fiscal situation and, ultimately, to the collapse of the economy at the end of 2001 (See Figure 1). Gross Domestic Product fell by 13.5 percent from the second quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2002, and the share of the population in poverty reached 58 percent in October 2002, versus 38 percent in October 2001, according to the official moderate poverty line. This paper addresses the distributional consequences of these macroeconomic events. (Note: Here and throughout the paper, “distribution of income” means the entire density or cumulative distribution function; it does not mean “inequality.”) Who benefited the most from Argentine economic growth? Who lost the most in economic decline? Are those who started rich getting richer in growth periods and losing more in recessionary periods, or is it the other way around? Are the answers to these questions the same for all measures of initial advantage

Versal deformations in orbit spaces

AbstractGiven an orbit space M/Γ and an equivalence relation defined in it by means of the action of a group G, we obtain a miniversal deformation of an orbit through a miniversal deformation in M with regard to a suitable group action of G×Γ. We show some applications to the perturbations of m-tuples of subspaces and (C,A)-invariant subspaces

Earnings Mobility in Times of Growth and Decline: Argentina from 1996 to 2003

In recent years, the economy of Argentina has experienced both rapid economic growth and severe economic decline. In this paper, we use a series of one-year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most in pesos when the economy contracted. To answer these questions, we test two hypotheses both unconditionally and conditionally. The ?divergence of earnings? hypothesis holds that in any given year, the highest earning individuals are those who experienced the largest earnings gains or the smallest earnings losses in pesos. The ?symmetry of gains and losses? hypothesis holds that those groups that gained the most in pesos when the economy grew are those that lost the most in pesos when the economy contracted. Both hypotheses are decisively rejected in the data. Rather, we find that it is the lowest income individuals and groups who gain the most in pesos, whether in good times or in bad. Thus, the panel data analysis performed in this paper presents a picture of economic growth that is much more pro-poor than one gets from cross sectional inequality comparisons.finance, growth, inequality, Argentina, survey, gains, losses

How Demanding Should Equality of Opportunity Be, and How Much Have We Achieved?

[Excerpt] This chapter proposes tests of various notions of equality of opportunity and applies them to intergenerational income data for the United States and Britain. Agreement is widespread that equality of opportunity holds in a society if the chances that individuals have to succeed depend only on their own efforts and not on extraneous circumstances that may inhibit or expand those chances. What is contentious, however, is what constitutes effort and circumstances. Most people, we think, would say that the social connections of an individual\u27s parents would be included among circumstances: equality of opportunity is incomplete if some individuals get ahead because they have well-connected parents. This and other channels through which circumstances affect income opportunities in an intergenerational context are discussed in Section 2. Section 3 then formulates four, increasingly stringent criteria for equality of opportunity. In Section 4, we turn to an empirical implementation of these criteria to test for equality of opportunity in the United States and Britain. The results, presented in Section 5, provide only the weakest of support for equality of opportunity in the United States and no support at all in Britain. Concluding remarks are presented in Section 6

Earnings Mobility in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela: Testing the Divergence of Earnings and the Symmetry of Mobility Hypotheses

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask whether those individuals who start in the best economic position are those who experience the largest earnings gains or the smallest earnings losses; this is the “divergent mobility” hypothesis. We also compare periods of positive economic growth with those of negative economic growth, asking whether those groups of individuals that experience large positive earnings gains when the economy is growing are the same as those that experience large earnings losses when the economy is contracting; this is the “symmetry of mobility” hypothesis. We find very occasional support for the divergent mobility hypothesis in scattered years in the cases of Mexico and Venezuela, and no support at all in the case of Argentina. Rather, earnings mobility is most frequently convergent or neutral in all three countries. As for the symmetry of mobility hypothesis, we find that it is rejected in most cases; rather, those groups that gain the most when the economy is growing are also the ones that gain the most when the economy is contracting. Furthermore, we explain how the absence of divergence is compatible with rising inequality in the countries under study

Income Mobility in Latin America

[Excerpt] In the last decades Latin American countries have experienced substantial macroeconomic instability. While the region as a whole experienced economic growth during most of the 1990’s and 2000’s, there were also years of stagnation as well as economic decline

A longitudinal retrospective study on intracranial arterial pulsatility index: its evolution in ten years' time and how it relates to the occurrence of cerebral and systemic ischemic disease

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Intracranial arterial pulsatility index (PI) has been related to old age, hypertension, diabetes and small vessel disease. However, the cross- sectional design of most studies prevents a proper assessment of causality and evolution. We sought to explore how this index changes through time, which conditions affect this evolution and whether or not it can predict the occurrence of future ischemic events. METHODS: Between the years 2001-2006, 1288 patients underwent a transcranial Doppler evaluation in the Department of Neurology of the Hospital Universitario Central de Asturias. PI values for the middle cerebral and basilar arteries were systematically annotated. After exclusion of deceased patients and significant large artery stenoses, 89 patients were recruited for a re-evaluation in 2012. Afterwards, the sample was expanded up to 150 patients, with 61 randomly selected patients –either alive or deceased- who did not undergo a second exploration. Both groups had their clinical files reviewed, with special attention to vascular risk factors and brain or coronary ischemic events. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Our results pointed to the following conclusions: • Intracranial arterial PI works as a dynamic measure of both cerebral and systemic vascular disease. • Age is the main factor influencing PI value and variation, but, within a certain age group, PI is able to point subjects at higher long-term risk of future ischemic events. • Basilar artery PI seems to be a better predictor of future cerebral and coronary ischemic disease than middle cerebral artery PI