INCOME DISTRIBUTION AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN PARAGUAY, 1972–88

The author reconstructs the income distribution of families in Paraguay for 1972, 1982, and 1988 by aligning three different urban household surveys with two farm income and two land tenure studies within a national accounts framework. He finds, first, a narrowing disparity between average family incomes in agriculture and non‐agriculture in the recent decade, and, second, a steady widening in the agrarian distribution in contrast to a more stable non‐agricultural distribution. The “cross‐over” of the Paraguayan agricultural distribution from one of greater to lesser equality than the non‐agricultural distribution is also found for a number of other recent cases and confirms Kuznets' speculation about the North American data. In the Paraguay experience, the “cross‐over” may be due to the deepening cleavage between the commercial minifundia and the modernizing latifundia in the areas of new settlement. Paraguay's countrywide distributions are also compared to other Latin American economies of similar income level and agricultural shares.