After a decade of strong progress toward the goal of reducing the high levels of income disparities, there are clear signs of a deceleration in the pace of inequality reduction in Latin America. This paper argues that the deceleration is the result of two set of reasons. First, several of the driving factors of the fall in inequality in the 2000s have lost strength, due to "natural" motives; and second, the external conditions faced by the Latin American economies have worsened in the early

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... s, making further reductions in inequality more difficult. Pablo ASTORGA JUNQUERA "The Haves and the Have Nots in Latin America in the 20th Century". Revista de Economía Mundial 43, 2016, pp. 47-68 This paper offers for the first time income shares of the top 10% and the bottom 40% of the labour force for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela in the period 1900-2011. The main findings are: i) over this period the top 10% share is, on average, 51.3% and the bottom 40% share 13.2%; ii) in the last thirty years the gap between both tails widened (54.6% vs. 11.9%), despite narrowing inequality in the 2000s; iii) there is no inequality levelling in the middle decades of the last century as experienced in the rich economies. This new long-term evidence confirms that the recent shared decline in inequality has no precedent in the 20th century; but it also shows that, as in the past, high concentration at the top 10% and a relatively low-income share of the bottom 40% continues to be the region's inequality trademark.