Instead of merely setting a lower bound on the wages of formal sector workers, minimum wages serve as a norm for wage setting more generally throughout the Mexican economy. Our results suggest that wages are commonly set at multiples of the minimum wage, and that changes in minimum wages...

The global financial crisis and spiking unemployment figures have raised the threat of escalating barriers to trade. An early conclusion to the Doha Round might help avert some of the increase in protectionism, but no one knows by how much. And while Doha will help the world economy, it will...

We decompose changes of the Gini coefficient to investigate whether the Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) have had an inequality reducing effect in three Latin American countries: Brazil, Mexico and Chile. The technique used is decomposition of the Gini coefficient by factor components. The main...

We decompose changes in the Gini coefficient to investigate whether the Conditional Cash Tranfers (CCT) have had an inequality reducing effect in three Latin American countries: Brazil, Mexico and Chile. We conclude that CCT programs helped reducing inequality between the mid-1990s and the...

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