Estimating income poverty and inequality from the Gallup World Poll: The case of Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper takes advantage of a new source of information – the Gallup World Poll 2006 – to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC estimates to those in other regions of the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage of being conducted in over 130 nations with almost the same questionnaire in all countries, and then it stands as a complement to national household surveys for international comparison purposes.