Income Inequality in the North-West of Argentina during the first globalization. Methodology and Preliminary Results

BEATRIZ ALVAREZ; ESTEBAN NICOLINI

Ciudad de México

Congreso; Second Latin American Economic History Congress (CLADHE-II); 2010

Asociaciones Latinoamericanas de Historia Económica

In this paper we analyze income inequality in Tucumán (a province in the North-West of Argentina) in the period of the first wave of globalization. The main goals of this paper are to propose the methodologies, to check the availability and consistency of the historical sources and to present the first (and preliminary) set of results. Our empirical strategy is similar to the ones based on “social-tables”: the population is divided into groups and an income is assigned to each group. The incomes of each group come from official statistics (National Labour Ministry Bulletin, Statistical Yearbook of the Province of Tucumán among others) and other sources while the population groups are defined following the occupational categories of the National census of 1895. Given that the sources used in this paper are available for other Argentine provinces and the applied methodology can be quite easily extrapolated to the whole country, we regard this paper as a first step in a larger project devoted to analyze the economic inequality in Argentina during the first globalization.