Inequality in Latin America

Although Latin America has faced many social, political, and economic issues within the last three centuries, inequality remains one of the most important, historical, and omnipresent aspects of the region’s culture. As Europeans took over Latin America during the time of colonization, they implemented many elitist social structures that have held strong and are evident today (Harris). Income inequality is the most visible and greatest disparity that the region faces; yet inequality between gender, ethnicities, and education remain strong and significant problems with a necessity for improvement. Inequality of wealth and disparity of power and influence are Latin American’s greatest curses and are at the root of many of the developmental, social, criminal, and political problems that continue to plague the region (De Ferranti). Since inequality has pervaded into every feature of Latin American society, it is important to measure inequality accurately in order to obstruct the causes of the discrimination and prevent new ones from beginning. The Gini Coefficient is an effective way that people indicate the inequality of a country by measuring a frequency distribution of income or wealth. Using the "Gini Index" of inequality in the distribution of income and consumption, the researchers found that Latin America and the Caribbean, from the 1970s through the 1990s, measured nearly 10 points more unequal than Asia, 17.5 points more unequal than the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and 20.4 points more unequal than Eastern Europe (De Ferranti). After inequality rose in the 1990s, the Gini coefficient for Latin America as a whole, declined from an average of 0.529 in 2000 to 50.9 in 2009. Of the 17 countries for which comparable data exist, 13 experienced a decline in their Gini coefficient during this period. When studying three of the most developed Latin American countries, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, it seems the decline

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