Journal Article
Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America

Latin America is the region with the highest levels of inequality in the world. This is the case when we look at inequality in income levels and income-generation capabilities among individuals, using micro-data. Recently, research has also looked into regional disparities between and within countries, which has raised new and important theoretical and empirical questions. Given the importance of the issue, especially in this region of the world, UNU and WIDER decided to launch a call for papers for a meeting to discuss recent findings aimed at explaining regional disparities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Three papers published in the previous issue and two in the present issue of Cuadernos de Economía-Latin American Journal of Economics were selected from those presented at a conference held at Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, in Cholula, México, as part of the UNU-WIDER project on Spatial Disparities in Human Development (Wood You, and Zhang (2004), Soto and Torche (2004), Araujo (2004), Escobal and Torero (2005), García-Verdú (2005)) . The project included the analysis of different regions and countries and was motivated by the presence of wide spatial disparities in per capita income and other socio-economic indicators within the Latin American region. More than 25 papers were received for the conference, whereas 8 were selected for a more detailed refereeing process and 5 have been selected for publication in this journal.