Health Inequality in Latin America since 1950

This paper examines adult heights to trace changes in health inequality in the second half of the twentieth century and places its findings in dialogue with larger narratives of development at a global scale. The period witnessed dramatic economic, political and social transformations, including urbanization, industrialization, improvements in economic productivity, education and life expectancy, and a transition from the depths of brutal authoritarian rule during the cold war to more open competitive electoral regimes in the 1980s and 1990s. At a global and long-term scale, Latin America in this period appears as a region with a steady progress in human development, yet by shifting geographic, temporal and demographic scales to focus on health conditions, we see that many Latin Americans were excluded from the progress implicit in the global narrative of development. The paper focuses on adult health as an indicator of health conditions. It uses a large collection of demographic and health surveys that measured biological indicators of adult women. The dataset includes information of tens of thousands of women from twelve Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru. While the surveys date from the late eighties to the present day, they are useful to track living conditions of cohorts born from the 1950s to the 1990s. I elaborate two measures of health inequality: the height gap according to educational level (a persistent indicator of economic opportunities and availability of state services), and the coefficient of variation. I compare inequality levels between different countries and break down trends by birth cohorts to assess how major changes in the political economy affected the inequality of health.