Distributive Justice and Economic Development. The Case of Chile and Developing Countries, edited by Andrés Solimano, Eduardo Aninat, and Nancy Birdsall, Development and Inequality in the Market Economy Series, The University Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2000.

The relationship between the proccess of creating wealth and distributing it has been a subject of great analytical and policy interest to development economists for many years. Is there an inevitable conflict, or tradeoff, between wealth creation and wealth distribution? Can both growth and social equity increase simultaneously? What role can public policy play to affect growth-equity outcomes?
These questions are particularly salient both for Latin America, where inequality levels are among the highest in the world, and for developing countries in general. A key question is to what extent market-oriented reform, followed with great impetus in the 1990s in the developing and postsocialist world, is compatible with socially accepted patterns of distibution of income, wealth, and opportunities.