The paper then summarizes various recent papers as well as the author s recent work on the impact of structural reforms on inequality. That work shows that the recent reforms have had a negative but small regressive impact on inequality mainly because many of the individual reforms had offsetting effects. Trade and tax reform have been unambiguously regressive, but opening up the capital account is progressive. Finally, the paper presents evidence of a significant slowdown in the growth rate and argues that given this fact and the insensitivity of the distribution to feasible policy measures, the main problem facing the region at present is not how to improve the distribution but rather how the increase the growth rate. Download full-text discussion paper .
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