This document analyzes the role of geographic characteristics in explaining the pattern of regional economic development in Mexico. The results indicate that some geographic variables, such as climate and vegetation, explain an important part of the differences that exist in the level and rate...

This paper reviews the pattern of income inequality in Mexico since 1994. It shows that in the past few years there has been an important reduction in income inequality in Mexico, which has almost reverted the sharp increase in inequality observed between 1984 and 1994. Using a Gini...

This paper analyzes the relationship between mean income and the income of the rich. Our methodology closely follows that of Dollar and Kraay (2002), but instead of looking at the bottom of the distribution, we analyze the top. We use panel data from the World Top Incomes database, which...

There are two sources of inconsistency in existing cross-country empiricalwork on growth: correlated individual effects and endogenous explanatoryvariables. We estimate a variety of cross- country growth regressions usinga generalized method of moments estimator that eliminates both problems.In...

Inequality in Mexico rose between 1989 and 1994 and declined between 1994 and 2010. We examine the role of market forces (demand and supply of labour by skill), institutional factors (minimum wages and unionization rate), and public policy (cash transfers) in explaining changes in inequality. We...

There is a concern among social scientists and policymakers that the COVID-19 crisis might permanently change the nature of work. We study how labor demand in Mexico has been affected during the pandemic by web scraping job ads from a leading job search website. As in the U.S., the number of...

During a global shock two forces act upon international remittances in opposite directions: income losses among migrants may reduce their ability to send remittances and, at the same time, migrants' concern for their family's wellbeing may prompt them to send more remittances back home. Which of...

In this paper, we derive three lessons from Mexico’s experience. First, deep reforms like trade liberalization are not likely to happen by government decree. Instead, they usually come about when the unanimous blocking of reform by powerful elites breaks down. In the case of Mexico, this...

The post-Keynesian tradition contains two different models of long-run growth in open economies -- the model of export-led cumulative causation (ELCC) originally conceived by Nicholas Kaldor and the model of balance-of-payments-constrained growth (BPCG) developed by A.P. Thirlwall. These models...