This article briefly examines the recent evolution of the Mexican financial system. Based on this, obstacles are identified. It is argued that two are most important. First, the property rights protection is weak in Mexico, thus it inhibits credit expansion. Second, competition is low and it is...

Based on growing theoretical literature, we present evidence from Mexico regarding the weak effectiveness of federal transfers and low absorption capacity of states and municipalities in poor countries in the presence of corruption and opportunistic behavior. We show that the distribution of...

This study shows that financing municipalities in Mexico is a segmented market. On the one hand, metropolitan and large municipalities have access to funds through the traditional, though efficient, channels such as commercial banking loans or the money-bond-market. In this sense these...

In this work we estimate the potential government revenue collection to finance Levy (2008)’s proposal of financing social security with Value Added Taxes, taking into account general equilibrium effects in a context of coexistence of formality and informality. Here, the latter is defined in...

In this paper we study the determinants of both the decision to be rated and the ratings for sub-national governments in a prominent LDC, Mexico. One of the main findings is that entity size does matter; as a matter of fact, population size is one of the two rating determinants common to all the...

This paper studies banking competition in Mexico. We use a contestable market approach to argue that competition in banking should be approached by considering all financial intermediaries and not only banks. In this sense, it is more important to look at the whole financial system. To...

This paper uses the methodology of Parry and Small (2005) to estimate the optimal gasoline tax for a less-developed, oil-producing country. The relevance of the estimation relies on the differences between less-developed countries LDCs and industrial countries. We argue that lawless roads,...