Mexican wage inequality rose following Mexico's accession to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization in 1986. Since the mid-1990s, however, wage inequality has been falling. Since most trade models suggest that output prices can affect factor prices, this paper...

For many in Latin America, the increasing participation of China and India in international markets is seen as a looming shadow of two mighty giants on the region's manufacturing sector. Are they really mighty giants when it comes to their impact on manufacturing employment? This paper attempts...

This Working Paper analyzes the institutions that shape public-private collaboration for the design and implementation of productive development policies in Colombia. These policies are increasingly designed in the context of formal institutions and venues, with public-private collaboration...

This paper surveys and analyzes industrial policies in Colombia, finding extensive use of productive development policies (PDPs) and despite claims of only moderate government intervention. Rarely explicitly associated with the need to address market failures, PDPs are instead associated with...

This paper explores the characteristics of the political economy process that conditioned the scope and success of the combination of fiscal reforms before and after Colombia's 1991 constitutional reforms. Using formal analysis of reforms and interviews with actors, reforms in taxation,...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2008. The Brazilian experience is instructive as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate TFP...

The returns to schooling and the skill premium are key parameters in various elds and policy debates, including the literatures on globalization and inequality, international migration, and technological change. This paper explores the skill premium and its correlation with exports in Latin...

Estimates of labor mobility costs are needed to assess the responses of employment and wages to a trade shock when factor adjustment is costly. Available methods to estimate those costs rely on panel data, which are seldom available in developing countries. In this paper, we propose a method to...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) for Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2008, both under the assumption of an exogenous or an endogenous law of motion for productivity. The authors first obtain TFP estimates under each alternative...