The IMF staff report on Mexico’s financial policies has been satisfactory; these policies have been said to act as a buffer against risks that erupted during the global economic crisis. Mexico has been identified as a prudent and fairly well-managed economy. However, the issues that would pose...

Mexico is an open economy with strong real and financial links to the rest of the world with risks of spillovers from global turbulence. Recent gains in market share in the U.S. manufacturing market are owed to improved relative unit labor costs and reemergence of a location advantage....

Comparing the 1978-82 Uruguayan stabilization with the 1990-94 Mexican experience reveals that exchange rate based stabilization tends to increase the economy’s vulnerability to unexpected shocks. An exchange rate rule, with full capital mobility, can only succeed if compatible financial...

During the past two years Latin America has received sizable international capital inflows. This paper compares the recent experience with that of the late 1970s. The analysis examines differences and similarities between the two episodes in three broad areas: domestic macroeconomic conditions...

This paper finds convergence of real per capita GDP in Mexico’s states and regions during the period of higher average national per capita growth (1970-85), and divergence during the lower-growth period (1985-93). These results hold across states and regions and within regions. The poorest...

This paper tests empirically the proposition that bank fragility is determined by bank-specific factors, macroeconomic conditions and potential contagion effects. The methodology allows for the variables that determine bank failure to differ from those that influence banks’ time to failure (or...

This paper attempts to provide a perspective on real exchange rate developments following the inception of the EMS. The focus is on structural determinants of real exchange rates, notably the behavior of tradables and nontradable prices and productivity. It is found that changes in the relative...

This paper provides new evidence on the wage gap between informal and formal salary workers in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. We use rich datasets that allow us to define informality in a relatively comparable fashion across countries. We compute precise wage differentials by accounting for...

The magnitude of remittance flows to Latin America exceeds the combined inflows of foreign direct investment and official development assistance to the region. Since the United States is the destination country of the vast majority of migrants from Mexico, as well as from other Latin American...