Astorga Junquera, Pablo2024-08-302024-08-302017Astorga P. Functional inequality in Latin America: news from the twentieth century. In: Bértola L, Williamson J, editors. Has Latin American inequality changed direction?: looking over the long run. Cham: Springer International Publishing; 2017. p. 17-41. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44621-9_29783319446202http://hdl.handle.net/10230/60967This chapter presents a new consistent yearly estimate of gross income (between-group) inequality Ginis for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela over the period 1900–2011, using a newly assembled wage dataset for three occupational categories. The approach used differentiates labour by skill level and allows for changing allocation of the labour force over time. Property income is calculated as a residual. Our regional Gini shows a changing secular process with a reclined “S” shape with an inflection point around 1940 and a peak in the 1990s. There are mixed country trends in the early and middle decades, but in most cases inequality was on the rise in the 1960s. There was also a tendency for narrowing wage inequality in the middle decades of the last century but whose impact was more than offset by a rising share of the top income group. Inequality in the twentieth century is a story of increased polarisation—particularly post-1970—amid significant social mobility.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2017. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, a link is provided to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work's Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material.Amèrica Llatina -- Condicions econòmiques -- S. XXDesigualtat social -- Amèrica Llatinainfo:eu-repo/semantics/bookParthttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44621-9_2info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess