al., 2014) and purposive policy intervention more generally (Kanbur, 2015a), such as conditional cash transfers, often made possible through booming commodity revenues. But to avoid painting an overly optimistic picture of inequality in Latin America, two additional facts need to be borne in mind: First, inequality followed an inverse-U shape, such that the fall in the 2000s came after a prolonged increase during the 1980s and 1990s. By 2012 the average Gini index had returned to the level during the early 1980s (Székely and Mendoza, 2015), so viewed from this long-run perspective progress has been limited.<sup>15</sup> Second, even after the strong decline, Latin America remains one of the most unequal regions in the world (the other being Sub-Saharan Africa).

East Asia shows a different pattern than Latin America, with inequality increasing during the 2000s on average, although with a lot of heterogeneity at the country-level. Inequality increased in the two most populous countries in the region, China and Indonesia, but at different times. In China, inequality surged in the 1990s but stabilized in the 2000s while inequality increased in Indonesia during the 2000s. During the 1980s, the Republic of Korea and Taiwan, China, managed the structural transformation toward becoming industrialized economies without major increases in inequality (Kanbur, 2015b). In contrast, Chinese inequality increased strongly during its transition, not dissimilar to the sharp rise in inequality in many Eastern European countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Milanovic and Ersado, 2010). Although data remain seriously limited, the available sources suggest a stabilization of inequality in China since the early/mid-2000s, so the peak might have been reached (Milanovic, 2016). Again, there are parallels with Eastern Europe, where inequality has been declining lately.

While data availability presents challenges in many developing countries, it poses particular problems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past two decades, data availability and quality have improved drastically, yet researchers are invariably constrained when looking at long-term trends. Levels of inequality are high in the region, especially in the southern countries. Seven of the ten most unequal countries in the world are in Africa (Beegle et al., 2016). This is remarkable given that all other high-inequality countries use income surveys while Sub-Saharan Africa uses expenditure surveys, which produce lower levels of inequality. Furthermore, inequality in the region is “too high” given its relatively widely shared land ownership (Milanovic, 2003). Looking at trends, a set of Sub-Saharan African countries with at least two strictly comparable and recent surveys (mostly in the 2000s) is split evenly into increasing and decreasing inequality (Beegle et al., 2016).<sup>16</sup> Countries with increasing inequality are slightly larger, so around 57% of the population live in a country where inequality rose.

The levels and trends in within-country inequality reviewed thus far have covered a range of different time periods. This section ends by looking at the most recent past which spans the Great Recession of 2008. This is a rather special period, so any change in trend needs to be interpreted

> 15 Székely and Mendoza (2015) is part of a special issue on “Inequality and Human Development in Latin America: A Long-Run Perspective” in the _Journal of Human Development and Capabilities_ (see introduction by Lopez-Calva et al., 2015).

> 16 This pattern of within-country inequality trends is confirmed by Cornia (2014) for a longer time period. Changes in survey design (e.g. urban or national coverage), implementation (e.g. effects of seasonality) or questionnaires (e.g. recall periods for consumption expenditures) can make surveys hard to compare.

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