La desigualdad regional de ingresos en la Argentina de las últimas décadas. Impacto redistributivo del Estado y contribución regional a la inequidad urbana

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of income inequality in different urban areas (regions and agglomerations) of Argentina and its evolution in the last twenty years. The study will focus on two aspects: 1) the evolution of inequality and the redistributive impact of government cash transfers at the local level; (2) the contribution of each area on the aggregate urban inequality.

For the first concern we analyze Gini coefficients of household per capita income (IPCF), before and after government cash transfers. The difference between both kind of coefficients (pre/post transfers) will be assumed to be a good indicator of the redistributive effect of the State intervention. The comparison will be performed for each regional grouping in the different years.

The second aspect, of a greater complexity, is the contribution of regions and agglomerations to the aggregated income inequity in the analyzed period. Inequality of the total urban population results of including in a single hierarchical distribution the income of people settled in different geographical areas, heterogeneous both in terms of demographic density and income levels. This more or less heterogeneity (between regions or agglomerates) originates differential contributions to the aggregate inequality. The Gini decomposition method used here is based on the procedure developed by Lerman and Yitzhaki (1985) and acknowledged by ECLAC in 2008 (Medina and Galván, 2008). The adaptation made here considers the income of residents of each of the many local areas as a particular source of the total urban income.

The definition of urban areas follows the official classification used by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC) for the Permanent Households Survey (EPH), main source of data informing this paper. We refer to the six statistical regions defined by the INDEC and to the different urban agglomerations represented on the EPH.

The study is preceded by a section that briefly describes the evolution of income inequality in the last twenty years, and allows us to identify the stages for the stylized analysis. A final section will be dedicated to the findings emerging from the evidence here offered.