The global textile and apparel sector is critically important as an early phase in industrialization for many developing countries and as a provider of employment opportunities to thousands of low-income workers, many of them women. The goal of this book is to explore how the lifting of the...

For anyone concerned about the effects of globalization on poverty in developing countries, the apparel sector in general and the end of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) and the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) in particular are key areas of interest. As an important first step toward...

The quality of education is a determining factor in a nation's competitiveness. To compete globally, Mexico needs to raise its education standards. Several innovations to raise the quality of basic education at the federal and state levels have been developed: professional training of teachers,...

The author investigates the relationship between a firm's adoption of new manufacturing technology and its performance. A panel database that identifies technological adoption and tracks firms over time allows the use of different measures of firm performance-wages, productivity, net employment...

The 2008-09 economic crisis has had a long-lasting negative impact on the Mexican economy. This paper examines labor market dynamics in Mexico in light of the crisis. The labor market has been characterized in recent years by low relative unemployment, but high levels of informal jobs,...

The authors follow the Hellerstein, Neumark, and Troske (1999) framework to estimate marginal productivity differentials and compare them with estimated relative wages. The analysis provides evidence on productivity and nonproductivity-based determinations of wages. Special emphasis is given to...

This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How poor are the southern states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca? How much progress was achieved in the 1990s toward reducing poverty in these states? Why are households in these states so poor? Specifically, does their poverty result from...

This paper uses a ten-year panel of firm-level data (1994–2005) to evaluate different type of enterprise support programs in Mexico. The applied methodology is a fixed effect model that addresses selectivity bias from observed and unobserved firm heterogeneity. The analysis finds evidence that...