Income inequality has increased in practically every industrialized nation in recent decades. The best measure of that change is the Gini index, named after the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who designed it in 1912. The index values vary between zero, when everyone has exactly the same income, and 1, when one person has all of…

The subject of Latin America’s middle class has been in the news frequently over the past few years. Together .  Therefore Latin America’s middle class is often a hotly debated subject. But how large is Latin America’s middle class? Different studies have yielded a wide range of estimates: anywhere between 170 and 350 million people.…

“Can ‘It’ Happen Again?” Such was the title of a well-known paper written by economist Hyman Minsky in 1982. “It” referred to financial crises. His answer at the time was in the affirmative. And so it remains today. The crisis that started in August 2007 has affected economies in different ways and in different degrees.…