A World of Contrasted but Interdependent Inequality Regimes: The Latin America Paradox

The previous issue of this journal published an explanation of three contemporary paradoxes: dramatically increased inequalities in China despite economic development reducing poverty; the excessively large costs incurred by the state following a surge of inequality in the finance-led growth regime of the United States (US); and, within Europe, some social democratic countries continue to exhibit a complementarity between and extended welfare system, more moderate inequalities and a dynamic innovation and production system. This analysis concluded that the US, Chinese and European inequality regimes are different but they express complementary growth patterns. Applying the same socio-economic approach, based upon the concept of inequality regimes, this article addresses another contemporary paradox. Latin America, previously the continent with the highest inequality, has reversed the former dynamics to exhibit a growth pattern based upon inequality reduction, while still relying heavily upon a strong international demand for commodities. This analysis investigates the durability and likelihood of the Latin American U-turn and concludes that there is a possible alternative to the hypothesis of an irreversible globalization of inequality because China, North America, Europe and Latin America do not follow the same trajectory, having developed contrasting regimes of inequality that co-evolve and are largely complementary at the global level. Consequently the future of more inclusive Latin American (and other) economies depends on the interaction between new domestic democratic advances and the reconfiguration of the international economy.     

Public Sector Employment,Wage Inequality and the Gender Pay Ratio in the UK

This paper assesses the relative contributions of the different systems of pay determination in the private sector and the public sector toward the changing level of wage inequality and the gender pay ratio in the UK. The greater centralisation of pay arrangements in the public sector compared with the private sector in the UK suggests that public sector employment may have acted to offset the widening wage inequality seen in recent years, as well as making an important contribution to the increase in women's relative average earnings compared to men. This issue is addressed by drawing on unpublished occupational hourly earnings data from the New Earnings Survey and applying decomposition of the Theil index of wage inequality to analyse both static and dynamic trends. The change in wage inequality for the period 1986 to 1995 primarily reflected the change in wage dispersion within the private sector, and the narrowing of the gender pay gap among the public sector workforce was an important factor in explaining the overall improvement in women's relative earnings. The paper argues that the relatively centralised pay arrangements in the public sector, compared with the private sector, played an important role in slowing the increase in wage inequality and narrowing the gender pay gap. As such, future policies to decentralise pay determination in the UK public sector may exacerbate the increasing level of wage inequality and reverse women's recent relative pay improvements.     

Anticipated monetary policy and real output: evidence from Latin American countries

This paper is an empirical investigation of the effects of anticipated and unanticipated monetary policies on real output for 13 LDCs in Latin and Central America. The well-know Mishkin econometric procedure is applied to the annual IMF date for the decomposition of actual money growth into anticipated and unanticipated components and the evidence of significant relation between anticipated money supply and real output for each country is reported. The results derived in this paper thus provide additional empirical support for the validity of the ‘non-classical rational expectations’ macro models of Fisher, and Phelps and Taylor.     

The Manufacturing Wage Inequality in Latin America and East Asia: Openness, Technology Transfer, and Labor Supply

This paper examines wage inequality in the manufacturing sector for a panel of Latin American and East Asian economies during the last three decades. A labor supply and demand model is presented where three main determinants of wage inequality are investigated: trade openness, technology transfer, and labor supply. Findings indicate that wage inequality in the two regions has responded differently to the various determinants enumerated above. Some lessons from the comparative experience of the two regions are drawn.     

Foreign education and international trade: empirical evidence from selected Latin American countries

Social ties among university students – of friendship, mutual trust and attachment to the alma mater – tend to be robust and enduring. Through information-diffusion and behaviour-enforcement mechanisms, they can boost the economic exchanges between countries. This paper tests the influence of Latin American people with a tertiary education in OECD countries on the bilateral trade between the home economy and the country of the alma mater, taking into account potential endogeneity concerns. Results show that Latin American student networks exert strong, positive and significant effects on bilateral imports and exports. A 10% increase in the number of Latin American students in the OECD economy boost bilateral trade by about 3%. At a more disaggregated level, their impact on differentiated goods is significantly higher than on homogenous products. Their incidence is lower in the presence of bilateral trade agreements and economic integration between countries. Results are robust to the deep economic and political transformations of the period considered, and to the use of different regressors and specifications.     

Unveiling the objectives of central banks: Tales of four Latin American countries

We estimate the stabilization objectives of four Latin American countries that have implemented a flexible inflation targeting regime recently: Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru. In doing so, we develop a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for these economies and estimate their structural parameters through Bayesian methods. To infer the stabilization objectives in each country, we assume that central banks set monetary policy optimally. Our main results highlight that the central banks in these four countries have a high preference for stabilizing inflation, but do not have the systematic objective of stabilizing the exchange rate. This result is robust to assuming either commitment or discretion in the optimal policy. Also, in contrast to the case of commitment, assuming discretion in the optimal monetary policy increases the preference for interest rate smoothing, making it comparable to a preference for inflation stabilization. Finally, except for the case of Peru, the monetary policy under discretion has a better empirical fit in these countries than the one under commitment.     

Inflation,its variability and consumption in selected Latin American countries

The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of inflation on consumer expenditures in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. Attention is also given to the impact of uncertainty about inflation and to the role of liquid assets.     

Trade Liberalization and Wage Inequality: Evidence from India

We evaluate empirically the impact of the dramatic 1991 trade liberalization in India on the industry wage structure. The empirical strategy uses variation in industry wage premiums and trade policy across industries and over time. In contrast to most earlier studies on developing countries, we find a strong, negative, and robust relationship between changes in trade policy and changes in industry wage premiums over time. The results are consistent with liberalization‐induced productivity increases at the firm level, which get passed on to industry wages. We also find that trade liberalization has led to decreased wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers in India. This is consistent with the magnitude of tariff reductions being relatively larger in sectors with a higher proportion of unskilled workers.     

Why Unions Reduce Wage Inequality: A Theory of Domino Effects*

Numerous empirical studies show that unions reduce wage differences. I demonstrate that their motive might be a mix of fairness and strategy, maximizing the use of union bargaining power in the presence of efficiency wages. Unions can push primarily for raising the lowest wages, and still not sacrifice higher wages much, if the employers themselves increase higher wages to protect efficiency-enhancing wage differences. If these “domino effects” are strong enough, then an egalitarian wage policy might even increase the median wage.     

Wage Inequality and Returns to Education in Turkey: A Quantile Regression Analysis

This paper investigates the male wage inequality and its evolution over the 1994–2002 period in Turkey by estimating Mincerian wage equations using ordinary least squares and quantile regression techniques. Male wage inequality is high in Turkey. While it declined at the lower end of the wage distribution it increased at the top end of wage distribution. Education contributed to higher wage inequality through both within and between dimensions. The within‐groups inequality increased and between‐groups inequality decreased over the study period. The latter factor may have dominated the former contributing to the observed decline in the male wage inequality over the 1994–2002. Further results are provided for the wage effects of experience, public sector employment, geographic location, firm size, industry of employment and their contribution to wage inequality. Recent increases in foreign direct investiment inflows, openness to trade and global technological developments are discussed as contributing factors to the recent rising within‐groups wage inequality.     

The endogeneity of the natural rate of growth – an empirical study for Latin‐American countries

The aim of this paper is to analyse the sensitivity of the natural rate of growth to the actual rate of growth for a sample of 11 Latin‐American countries, assuming the natural rate to be determined endogenously by changes in the actual rate of growth. The natural rates of growth are estimated in a system of SUR estimations over the period 1986–2003. In order to determine whether they react endogenously to changes in the actual rate of growth, a dummy variable for boom periods is added to the system of regressions. The results confirm the hypothesis about the endogeneity of the natural rate of growth.     

西方发达国家劳动就业的比较研究及其启示

20世纪90年代以后,随着经济全球化的逐步发展,各国就业问题出现新的特点及其发展趋势。世界各国尽管国情不一,但无论是发达国家还是发展中国家,都把提高就业作为宏观经济政策的主要调控目标。世界各国特别是发达国家对就业问题的政策措施,对当今中国解决就业问题无疑具有借鉴作用。     

Inequality and Economic Growth: A Global View Based on Measures of Pay

This paper discusses two issues in the relationship betweeninequality and economic growth: the data and the econometrics.We first review the income inequality data set of Deiningerand Squire (D&S), which, we argue, fails to provide eitheradequate or accurate coverage, whether through time or acrosscountries. We then introduce our own measures of the inequalityof manufacturing pay, based on UNIDO's Industrial Statistics.These provide indicators of pay inequality that are more stable,more reliable and in our view also more comparable across countries,than the D&S data. Turning to the fabled "Kuznets" relationship between inequalityand economic development, we diagnose several common econometricproblems in the literature, including measurement error andomitted variable bias. By taking steps to account for theseproblems, and by introducing a more complete panel data setbased on pay inequalities, we seek more reliable inferencesconcerning the relationship between inequality, national incomeand economic growth. We find evidence that generally supportsKuznets' specification for industrializing countries: pay inequalitytends to decline as per capita income increases, though withsome tendency for the relationship to curve up for the richestcountries. After 1981 two findings emerge. First, per capitaGDP growth slowed dramatically in most countries, increasinginequality along the augmented Kuznets curve. Second, thereis a global and macroeconomic effect that produces rising inequalityin our data, independent of GDP or its changes. The timing ofthis effect suggests a link to the high real interest ratesand global debt crisis of the period beginning in 1982. (JELC23, D31, J31, O11)     

中国地区工资水平差异的影响因素分析

本文运用模块数据和空间计量学的方法考察了中国改革开放以来影响地区工资水平及地区工资非均衡的各种政策体制因素和经济因素。实证结果表明,中国的地区工资水平及其差异既受制度变迁的影响又受市场机制的作用,具有典型的转型特征。具体而言,工资体制、对外开放、所有制改革、地方保护、教育水平和资本投入等因素对地区工资水平及其差异都有不同程度的影响作用。     

Instability in short-run adjustments to purchasing power parity: results for selected Latin American countries

According to the theory of purchasing power parity (PPP), there is a tendency toward equalization of different countries' price levels in common-currency terms. However, even assuming that a long-run PPP relationship exists, its relevance for policy makers in less developed countries (LDCs) will depend not only on the average speed of adjustment toward this relationship but also on the variability of such short-run adjustments. We present evidence of extreme volatility in adjustments toward PPP for four Latin American countries, based on time-varying-parameter estimates of error-correction models.     

Purchasing power parity for fifteen Latin American countries: Stationary test with a Fourier function

This study applies a stationary test with a Fourier function, proposed by Becker et al. (2006), to test the validity of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) in fifteen Latin American countries over the period of December 1994 to February 2010. The empirical results from the univariate unit root tests indicate that PPP does not hold for these fifteen countries under study. However, a stationary test with a Fourier function indicates that PPP is valid for four of these 15 Latin American countries and they are Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Uruguay. These results have important policy implications for these fifteen Latin American countries under study.     

Product and process innovation and total factor productivity: Evidence for manufacturing in four Latin American countries

The literature on firm productivity recognizes the important role played by firm innovation activities on firm productivity in developed countries. However, the literature for developing and emerging economies is scarce and far from conclusive. The aim of this paper is to study the innovation–productivity link (distinguishing between process and product innovations) for manufacturing at the firm level for four Latin American countries (two classified as upper‐middle income countries by the World Bank—Argentina and Mexico—and two as lower‐middle income—Colombia and Peru). We aim testing whether the level of development is a mediating factor in the innovation–productivity link. The data used have been drawn from the World Bank panel enterprise surveys, for 2006 and 2010. First, we estimate total factor productivity (TFP) and, second, we use the estimated TFP as a regressor or as dependent variable, in two models for testing self‐selection of the most productive firms into innovation or the existence of returns to innovation in terms of productivity. Our results confirm the mediating role of the level of development in the innovation–productivity link: both the self‐selection and the returns‐to‐innovation hypotheses work only for the upper‐middle income countries.     

Patterns of technological specialisation in Latin American and East Asian countries: an analysis of patents and trade flows

This article provides an extensive analysis of the technological specialisation of three Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico) and two East Asian countries (South Korea and Taiwan). Technological specialisation is measured both with respect to patents and trade flows. This article provides different measures of technological specialisation: Ricardian and Smithian specialisation indexes and the contribution to trade balance. These indicators provide a new picture of the evolution of the patterns of technological specialisation. Latin American countries show a divergent technological specialisation from East Asian countries, since the 1970s. In particular, Latin American countries display weaknesses in computers and communications and electrical and electronic sectors and their specialisation in fast growing technological classes is declining, in contrast to East Asian countries. While East Asian countries have shifted to specialised supplier or science-based sectors, Latin American countries have increased their trade specialisation in supplier-dominated or scale-intensive sectors.     

Purchasing power parity for 15 Latin American countries: Panel SURKSS test with a Fourier function

This study applies Panel SURKSS test with a Fourier function to investigate the properties of long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) in fifteen Latin American countries over the period of December 1994 to February 2010. The empirical results from the univariate unit root and panel-based unit root tests indicate that PPP does not hold for these fifteen countries under study. However, results from the Panel SURKSS test with a Fourier function indicate that PPP is valid for these fifteen countries, with the exception of Honduras. Our results highlight the importance of incorporating both nonlinearities and structural breaks when testing the validity of long-run PPP. These results have important policy implications for these fifteen Latin American countries under study.