This exercise estimated competitiveness for the 32 federal states of Mexico taking into account production, productivity, employment and wages in 82 activities representing 95% of total GNP. There are two types of states. The dozen of competitive states are more diversified and show higher...

The development of economic institutions characterizes economic growth and promotes efficiency. For example, formal credit institutions operate in the credit market in a more efficient way than informal money lenders because they are better in reducing costs associated with financial market...

Ideas about ethnicity, religion, and nationalism among others, which we label “ideology”, seem to affect the preferences of voters, political parties and finally, the equilibrium policy. In this paper we provide a political-economic model that traces the influence of ideology on determining...

In Mexico, as in most Latin American countries with indigenous populations, it is commonly believed that European phenotypes are preferred to mestizo or indigenous phenotypes. However, it is hard to test for such racial biases in the labor market using official statistics since race can only be...

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between inflation, inflation volatility and output growth in the case of México using monthly data over the period 1993-2011. Specifically a bivariate GARCH-M model is estimated to test the hypotheses that inflation rates are directly related...

This paper studies the evolution of beliefs of a group of Bayesian updaters who are connected through a social network that enables them to listen to the opinions of others. Each agent observes a sequence of private signals about the value of an unknown parameter. In addition, the agent receives...

Mexico is a highly centralized federation. The states and municipalities are highly dependent on federal transfers and so equally at risk to the country’s fiscal dependence on oil. Although Mexico has become more truly federal since multiparty competition has become vibrant and several states...

This paper uses the methodology of Parry and Small (2005) to estimate the optimal gasoline tax for a less-developed, oil-producing country. The relevance of the estimation relies on the differences between less-developed countries LDCs and industrial countries. We argue that lawless roads,...

By introducing a delay differential equation into a population model this paper attempts to show that an update on Malthus’s principle of population requires using new mathematical analyses involving oscillations around a stable attractor. Acceptance of the fact that Malthusian dynamic...

This paper examines the role of several factors in reducing the production costs of Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, including learning-by-doing (LBD), economies of scale, rising factor prices, market competitiveness, and exogenous technological changes. Using the aggregate industry-level data over...