roughly the same time in Indonesia. These contrasts were already foreseen in Manuelyan-Atinc and Walton (1998).

Finally, even if the impact of crisis on market price and incomes was the same the world over, the ability and willingness of the government to maintain or improve the safety net is most unlikely to be.

For all of these reasons, generalization from the Indonesian experience should be done with care. Nevertheless, each continent has seen important recent crises for which studies suggest that they have also been associated with narrowing inequalities.

# _Mexico, 1994_

Baldacci et al. (2002) present some detail on shifts in Mexican income distribution for the three Mexican National Household Income and Costs Surveys ( _ENIGH_ ) 1992, 1994 and 1996. Poverty incidence increased dramatically in the immediate aftermath of the crisis – moderate poverty (as nationally defined) jumped from 36 to 48 percent of the population and extreme poverty from 11 to 17 percent in the two years to 1996. Nevertheless, the lower deciles were not the worst affected in relative terms. The income share of the top decile fell from 44 percent to 42 percent, with gains in all of the other deciles (except the fourth). Accordingly, not only the Gini, but the Theil and Atkinson’s indices (for parameters 0.5, 1 and 2) all show improvements. This holds for both the data on income and expenditure. Baldacci et al. also show that the change between 1992 and 1996 in the probability of being poor in Mexico is systematically related to geographical and age characteristics: households in Yucatan province, and in urban areas, and those with very young or very old heads, all displayed a heightened propensity to be poor. Transfers kept 6.1 percent of the population out of poverty in 1996, compared with 4.5 percent in 1994 – suggesting little improvement in the scale or targeting of income transfers.

Actually, the Mexican case alerts us to just how severe are data problems on inequality from standard sources. Even as straightforward a question such as: “did the Gini coefficient increase in Mexico between 1994 and 1996” produces conflicting answers in the literature. Table 2 and Figure 1 show the trend in the Gini coefficient 1992-1998 as reported in different studies mostly based on the _ENIGH_ . The apparently sizable increase in the Gini index in 1992-95 reported by the World Bank’s _Povcal_ is not confirmed by any of the other studies for the intervals 1992-94 and 1992-96.<sup>13</sup> (This needs to be borne in mind in considering the findings of Section 5, which is based on _Povcal_ data, though it does not use the offending 1995 Mexico observation.)<sup>14</sup>

# _Russia, 1998_

Lokshin and Ravallion (2000) review the experience with the Russian crisis of 1998. Their major interest is in examining the role of the safety net in favorably impacting the distributional and poverty impact; they conclude that changes in the safety net had a

> 13 Although included in _Povcal_ , this 1995 estimate is annotated as “less reliable” in the WIID2 database. 14 Using household panel data, Fields and Sanchez (2004) provide details on the Argentina case of 2001-2 suggesting that, although the Gini coefficient worsened, it was not those who had escaped from poverty pre-crisis that fell back.

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