Mexico

A long tradition sees the small firm sector as a holding pattern for workers queuing for jobs in the formal sector of a segmented labor market. An alternative "entrepreneurial"... Show More + view suggests that many workers prefer self-employment to salaried jobs. These competing views can be resolved if the sector is heterogeneous. Using factor and cluster analysis, the authors generate a typology of the sector by taking advantage of a Mexican data set on micro-firms that offers information on a broad range of small firm characteristics. The methodology permits divisions to emerge from the data without the a priori imposition of a theoretical structure. The data break into several distinct groups, broadly characterized as highly profitable and dynamic young firms, older firms that have stabilized at a small size, and young firms that act as an employer of last resort. Those in the last group, comprised of older entrepreneurs with low levels of education, are the most likely to cite that they started their firms because they were unable to find a salaried job. In general most of the firm owners in all groups stated that they chose self-employment over formal sector employment in order to be independent, collect higher earnings, or follow family tradition. These survey responses are supported by the finding that income distribution adjusted for human capital is composed of two sub-distributions, with the "underperforming" distribution comprising only 14 percent of the sample. The factor analysis also implies that firm owner characteristics and firm size or profitability may not be correlated. For example, young workers who we might think are forced into the small firm sector due to inability to enter the formal job market do not necessarily earn less or have less capital than older entrepreneurs. Furthermore, a distribution of the earnings residual factor shows that very few firms, regardless of the firm owner's age, are earning below their expected profits. The data suggest that the small size of informal firms may not necessarily result from limited access to financial institutions or a desire to evade labor or tax laws. Instead, the firms simply may be in the beginning stages of a growth process or owners may prefer to remain small. Show Less -

The informal microfirm sector is believed to be large, accounting for 20-40 percent of employment in many developing countries. The literature tends to view the sector... Show More + as the disadvantaged sector of a segmented labor market, as existing to evade government regulations, or as constrained by lack of access to government services. The authors offer a unique theoretical framework to analyze informality and microfirm growth behavior -- one that emphasizes the entrepreneurial nature of informal firms and sees informality as a secondary characteristic. First, they assume that informal firms in developing countries have dynamics similar to firms in industrial countries: entrepreneurs have unobserved, differing cost structures that determine their long-run size and survival -- structures that they can only discover by going into business. Second, informality can be thought of as a decision to participate in societal institutions. Access to mechanisms that ensure property rights, pool risk, or enforce contracts become more important as a firm grows, and the entrepreneur will be willing to pay for them through "taxes" in a way that was not the case as a small firm. The combination of these assumptions generates several of the stylized facts emerging from cross-sectional data and identified in existing models -- informal firms tend to remain small and have high rates of mortality, and lower productivity -- without recourse to government-induced distortions in labor or product markets. Further, the framework predicts that firms whose cost structures dictate that they should expand will make the transition to formality as they grow. Using detailed observations from Mexico, the authors find their view consistent with patterns of formality and growth of microfirms. Show Less -

Mexico's growth rate began to plummet at roughly the same time that its public investment expenditures declined. That decline also appears to coincide with a slowdown... Show More + in the growth of infrastructure capital in the electricity, transport, and communications sectors. Because of these parallel developments, many economists have attributed at least part of the blame for the decline in Mexico's growth after 1981 to the decline of public infrastructure investment. The empirical results presented in this report provide only limited support for this argument. They also suggest, in turn, that increases in public investment would not automatically translate into faster output and productivity growth. One reason not to take for granted a positive relationship between more public investment and faster growth is public investment's crowding out effect on private investment. Although the time-series regression results for Mexico all point toward a crowding out coefficient of less than unity, the existence limits the growth impact of public investment by reducing its net effect on capital accumulation. The time-series results also suggest that the economy's total factor productivity growth responds positively to increases in the ratio of public to private investment. In light of that result, increases in public investment should have a positive net impact on economic growth, despite significant crowding out effects. Chow breakpoint tests indicate, however, that the positive productivity effect appears to have weakened significantly in the past decade. A third reason for questioning a stable relationship is that the impact of increased public investment is likely to depend on how it is financed. The cross-country regressions reported here indicate that a general increase in the public capital stock has a positive impact on growth only if financed through savings generated through lower public consumption expenditures, but not if financed through higher public debt, which implies higher current and future taxation levels. The scope for reducing public consumption expenditures in Mexico is very limited, however, since they are already at rock bottom levels. Therefore, the only way to assure that the public investment program makes a significant contribution to growth is by improving its "quality" through careful attention to its rate of return and complementarity with private capital. In Mexico the most important reforms to make public investment more productive came from policymakers' recognition of the need to distinguish more clearly between the roles of the public and private sectors. This led to the privatization of most public enterprises and a reorientation of public investment to a more narrowly focused set of activities. In addition, the government took important steps to strengthen the institutional framework within which the public investment program is determined. Show Less -

Education attainment levels increased dramatically for Mexico's labor force in the 1980s and early 1990s. In parallel, the country experienced a pronounced increase... Show More + in earnings inequality from 1984-94, reflected in a higher dispersion of wages and an absolute decline in the real incomes of less educated, poorer Mexicans. This increased wage dispersion presents policymakers with a tradeoff between efficiency considerations (favoring increased spending on higher education) and equity considerations (favoring a more equal distribution of per student spending) in the allocation of fiscal resources to education. The author concludes that the best way to deal with this equity-efficiency tradeoff is to encourage greater private participation in higher education. His main findings are that: a) The accumulation of human capital during 1984-94, as proxied by education attainment, was accompanied by a more equal distribution of education attainment levels over that period and, thus, exerted an equalizing effect on the distribution of incomes. The increased income inequality observed over that period appears to be caused by an increased rate of skill-based technological change, whose transmission to Mexico and other developing countries may have been facilitated by the increased openness of their economies. b) The greater dispersion of wager observed in Mexico during the past decade raised the rates of return on investing in higher education, reversing the traditional pattern where primary education exhibits the highest rates of return. c) The social rates of return across levels of schooling were more uniform in 1994 than in 1984, suggesting a more efficient assignment of education spending. At the same time, the distribution of spending on education became more egalitarian, as per student spending in higher education declined markedly compared with per student spending at the primary level. This surprising coincidence in the pattern of spending on education was only possible because Mexico started out with a very distorted resource allocation in education that was both highly inequitable and inefficient. As Mexico's policymakers are on the way to correcting these distortions, the opportunities for avoiding the equity-efficiency tradeoff within Mexico's centralized education framework will become progressively exhausted. d) There is little reason to expect the pace of technological change, which appears mainly responsible for raising wage dispersion and the relative returns on higher education, to abate. Efficiency considerations dictate that Mexico should respond by devoting more resources to higher education. However, the federal budget, which traditionally has financed the lion's share of higher education costs in Mexico, is unable to accommodate additional spending on higher education, while spending cuts elsewhere in the education sector are bound to raise serious equity questions. Thus, to avoid falling behind in terms of human capital accumulation, greater private sector participation is necessary, at least, in terms of cost recovery from the main beneficiaries of higher education. Show Less -

In 1995-96, Mexico shifted to a multipillar approach to old-age security. The objective of the publicly managed first pillar is redistribution; a fully-funded second... Show More + pillar provides for mandatory individual savings accounts and competitive but exclusive and specialized pension fund management; the third pillar is voluntary savings. The package could provide effective income security and protection against old-age poverty, in a manner compatible with goals of savings and economic growth. It offers Mexico's first real opportunity to shift to a defined-distribution model and to expand and deepen institutional investors - although in the short term its impact on capital markets will be limited by the need to focus on the security of pension fund investments. The reformed systems provides for a probably irreversibly shift toward private intermediation of most domestic investment funds. Further efforts to improve the pension system should encourage efficiency, confidence, and economies of scale. There are weaknesses in Mexico's pension design - especially the limited scope for workers in the private sector, the continued role of the housing-fund component, and the moral hazard implications of the lifetime-switch option. But Mexico achieved radical reform with its pension system within a difficult political and economic environment. And the timing of the reform was appropriate. The age structure in the existing system was very young, so coverage could increase. Also, reform took place after the inflationary 1980s and the recent financial crisis, which eroded the real value of old pensions, the acquired pension rights of the transition generation, and the minimum pension for minimum-wage retirees. If returns on invested contributions are high enough, much of the transition generation will choose the defined-contribution alternative over the old pay-as-you-go system. This will release the government from pension liabilities, except for the minimum pension guarantee for new affiliates. Ensuring the system's long-term success will require improved financial performance from INFONAVIT, the authorities' political will and regulations, and the system's flexibility in the face of changing circumstances. Show Less -

Competing conceptions of the large, unprotected, "informal" workforce in developing countries differ greatly in their implications for the labor reform considered to... Show More + be essential complements to trade liberalization and "fair" competition in international trade. Traditionally, the informal sector is viewed as the disadvantaged segment of a dual labor market segmented by legislated or union-induced rigidities and high labor costs in the protected (or "informal") sector. In this view, the size of the informal sector is a testament to the inefficiencies in labor allocation and the magnitude of required reform. In cyclical downturns, the informal sector is thought to absorb displaced workers from the formal sector (with informal earnings falling relative to those in the formal sector) and then to contract again during recovery as the queue for "good jobs" shortens again. A recent, related view postulates a long-term trend in which large enterprises, confronted by heightened global competition, increasingly subcontract to unprotected workers as a way to reduce costs and gain flexibility. This is particularly relevant in the debate about establishing common labor standards in regional trade agreements. The author reexamines the traditional view of the dual labor market by studying the dynamics between the formal and informal sectors across a business cycle and a period of trade liberalization in Mexico (1987-93). He shows conventional comparisions of earnings, even across time, to be unreliable tests for segmentation. As an alternative, he shows that transitions on informal employment, the size of the informal sector, and levels of mobility to be procyclical, increasing with upturns, and decreasing with recessions. He tests for, and finds, however, some evidence of queuing to enter formal employment. Overall, he contends, the informal sector behaves as an unregulated entrepreneurial sector rather than the disadvantaged wing of a dual labor market. There is evidence of increased subcontracting over time, with trade liberalization, but it is not clear that workers are worse off as a result. Show Less -

Different ways of discussing development strategy often reflect different definitions of development. Analysts who emphasize income or production as indicators of development... Show More + may focus on macroeconomics or sectors. Other analysts may focus on distribution and social aspects as development. Economists tend to see development strategy from the normative, technocratic perspective of welfare economics. Political scientists may see development as a process of political interaction between different interests. Using Mexico as a case, the authors examine macroeconomic conditions and policies (based on flow of funds tables) and estimates of resource transfers between sectors and regions, to relate them to development strategies. They find that: 1) Macroeconomic conditions and policies have exerted a strong impact on resource transfers between the productive sector and the financial and fiscal sectors. 2) Because of the strong impact of macroeconomic conditions and policies, resource transfers between productive sectors were not necessarily evident for either financial or fiscal transfers. But combined transfers from nonagricultural states to agricultural states were significant in three out of four periods examined. 3) The government more effectively controls fiscal transfers because it is directly involved in decisionmaking about public investment and federal participation. Figures on fiscal transfers suggest that the government favored agricultural states in the quarter century studies. 4) Fiscal transfers dominated financial transfers--hence the general transfer from nonagricultural states to agricultural states. The Mexican government maintained a strong interventionist stance toward the rural and agricultural sector even as it espoused reducing the government's role in economic management. 5) During the era of shared development, the government favored less productive agricultural states over highly productive agricultural states. As agrarian reform was reformed, this favoritism diminished and eventually disappeared. 6) The study results reflect the Mexican government's political inclination to favor agricultural or rural states in coping with macroeconomic turmoil. In terms of development strategy, the federal government may have maintained that preference in securing resource flows, but that focus on the subsistence sector seems to have diminished recently. Show Less -

Are multinationals flocking to pollution havens in developing countries? Using data from four developing countries (Cote d'Ivoire, Mexico, Morocco, and Venezuela), the... Show More + authors examine the pattern of foreign investment. They find almost no evidence that foreign investors are concentrated in dirty sectors. They also examine the behavior of multinationals doing business in these four countries, testing whether there is any tendency for foreign firms to pollute more or less than their host country counterparts. To do this, they use consumption of energy and dirty fuels as a proxy for pollution intensity. They find that foreign plants in these four developing countries are significantly more energy-efficient and use cleaner types of energy than their domestic counterparts. The authors conclude with an analysis of US outbound investment between 1982 and 1994. They reject the hypothesis that the pattern of US foreign investment is skewed toward industries in which the cost of pollution abatement is high. Show Less -

In November 1989, Mexico City's administration imposed a regulation banning each car from driving on a specific day of the week. The regulation has been both popular... Show More + and controversial. Some feel that it is a reasonable concession aimed at alleviating congestion and pollution problems. Others feel it is both inefficient and unfair: inefficient in the way most rationing systems are inefficent, and unfair in that it is costly to some and easily avoided or accommodated by others. Some feel that it may also be so inefficient that it is counterproductive. The authors found evidence to support that view. Many households bought an additional car to get additional driving permits, and the amount of driving increased. Greater use of old cars and increased weekend driving may have contributed to the disappointing results of Mexico's one-day ban on driving: high welfare costs and none of the intended benefits. Show Less -

There are diverging views about how minimum wages affect labor markets in developing countries. Advocates of minimum wages hold that they redistribute resources in a... Show More + welfare-enhancing way, and can thus reduce poverty, improve productivity, and foster growth. Opponents, on the other hand, contend that minimum wage interventions result in a misallocation of labor and lead to depressed wages in the very sectors - the rural and informal urban sectors - where most of the poor are found, with the effect of wasting resources and reducing the growth rate. Data from Colombia and Mexico for the 1980s provide an opportunity to evaluate the impact of minimum wages. In Mexico in the 1980s, the minimum wage fell in real terms roughly 45 percent. By 1990, Mexico's minimum wage was about 13 percent of the average unskilled manufacturing wage. During the same period, the minimum wage in Colombia increased at nearly the same rate, reaching roughly 53 percent of the average unskilled wage. The author charts how the mandated minimum wage affected the demand for skilled and unskilled labor in both countries during that decade. Findings are as follows. In Mexico, minimum wages have had virtually no effect on wages or employment in the formal sector. The main reason: the minimum wage is not an effective wage for most firms or workers. In the informal sector, in turn, there is considerable noncompliance with the mandated minimum wage, especially among part-time and female workers. As a result, significant numbers of workers are paid at or below minimum wages. In Colombia, minimum wages have a much stronger impact on wages, judging from their proximity to the average wage and both cross-section and time series estimates. The estimates imply that the elasticity of low-paid unskilled employment with respect to minimum wages is in the range of 2 to 12 percent. Show Less -