Distributional Incidence of Social, Infrastructure, and Telecommunication Services in Latin America

摘要

This paper performs a distributional incidence analysis to study the patterns describing access to, and expenditures on, basic services (education, health, public transport, water, electricity, gas and telecommunications) in Latin American countries. We find that household expenditures on these services are pro-rich distributed, mainly because poorest households face limited access to services. Also, services with the highest expenditure shares (education, health, and transport) are characterized by moderate to small Kakwani indices, while services with high Kakwani indices (telecommunication and gas) represent a small part of total household consumption, suggesting small distributional effects of potential reforms of services sectors.