and the East Asia and the Pacific region experienced widening income inequality over the past decade, while data on the Sub-Saharan Africa region and the South Asia region show almost no change in inequality over the same period. Data on the Middle East and North Africa region reveal a modest decline during the 2000s, but the sample in this region only includes five countries, and data collection there is rather infrequent. The authors conclude, then, that the narrowing in income inequality in Latin America in the 2000s has been remarkable.

To analyze regional trends in several parts of this study, we use unweighted averages of the countryspecific trends for which data are available (unless otherwise indicated). This means that each analysis presented will be the average of the same indicator at the country level. Since not all the countries have information for all the years, a simple linear interpolation is conducted to have balanced panel data. If data are missing at the beginning or at the end of each country series, they are replaced by the value of the nearest year on which information is available. However, excluding these interpolations and extrapolations does not change qualitatively the results of the long-term trends.

Our analysis of the Latin America region (figure 2), which is based on comprehensive harmonized household survey data (the SEDLAC database), reaches a conclusion similar to the conclusions of previous studies, showing that the total income Gini coefficient in the region rose moderately during the 1990s (Londoño and Székely 2000), dropped significantly during the 2000s (Gasparini et al. 2009; López-Calva and Lustig 2010), and experienced a slowdown and possible stagnation during the early 2010s (Cord et al. 2016; Gasparini et al. 2016). Although it may still be too early to claim with any certainty that stagnation has occurred in the regional trends in income inequality, both regional aggregates in figure 2 represent evidence of a slower pace in inequality reduction since 2010, more marked in the case of the weighted average because of the upward inequality in Mexico and the slowdown in the decline in inequality experienced in Brazil (Cord et al. 2016).

The decline in income inequality observed in the region during the period is the most synchronized of these three trends. It is robust to the inequality measure<sup>25</sup> and to the aggregation method, both weighted and unweighted averages of country values. Moreover, the decline occurred in 16 of 17 countries in the region,<sup>26</sup> and it holds once the comparability issues of the country-specific trends are taken into account. In contrast, the increase in regional inequality during the 1990s and the slowdown after 2010 hides a certain amount of heterogeneity at the country level. For instance, during the 1990s, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile experienced a slight fall in total income inequality, in contrast with other countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Honduras, which witnessed sharp increases. Moreover, the still recent slowdown in the 2010s has meant different trends in some countries such as Bolivia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, where inequality has increased, while other countries experienced a slowdown, such as Chile and Brazil.

> 25 Our analysis also reaches this conclusion based on the Theil index, the mean log deviation, the Atkinson index, and the 90/10 ratio. 26 Only Costa Rica exhibited an increase in inequality over the first decade of the 2000s (figure C.1, panel b).

8