Anyway, it would be great to receive comments on it if anyone has time to read it. Below is the abstract and here the paper:
Past
historical experience and both orthodox and heterodox economic theories lead us
to expect a positive relationship between income inequality and commodity
booms. Yet most of the literature has
not been surprised by the fact that Latin America’s recent improvement in
income distribution coincided with a rapid growth in commodity exports. How was this positive outcome possible? Did
income distribution improve because of higher commodity revenues or despite
them? This paper answers these questions—seldom explored in the literature—through
an extensive discussion of economic studies, descriptive statistics and policy
changes. The paper shows that the reduction of inequality took place among the
bottom 90% of the population only, while the income share of the wealthy remained
stable when properly measured. I show that the reduction in the Gini
coefficients resulted from a combination of better labour market outcomes—which
favoured unskilled workers more than skilled ones—and better distributive and
redistributive policies. The paper concludes that political pressures forced
most Latin American governments to manage the commodity boom better than in the
past in the short run but did not lead to significant transformations in the
region’s elite-driven development model.