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López-Calva, Luis-Felipe
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Poverty Global Practice, The World Bank
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January 31, 2023
Publication Search Results
1 - 7 of 7
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Publication
Declining Wages for College-Educated Workers in Mexico: Are Younger or Older Cohorts Hurt the Most?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01)Wage inequality has declined in Mexico since 2000. Using data from Mexican labor surveys for the period between 2000 and 2014, this paper investigates whether the decline was driven by wages declining more sharply for younger or older workers. The analysis finds that the wages of older workers declined and the decline was more pronounced in the older cohort. This would seem to support the hypothesis that older workers' skills have become obsolete. -
Publication
Understanding the Dynamics of Labor Income Inequality in Latin America
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-08)Since the early 2000s, after a long period of wide and persistent gaps, Latin America has experienced a steady decline in income inequality. This paper presents evidence of a trend reversal in labor income inequality, which is considered the main factor behind such a decline in income inequality across the region. The analysis shows that, while labor income inequality increased during the 1990s, with heterogeneous experiences across countries, it fell in a synchronized way across countries beginning in the early 2000s. This systematic decline was supported by an expansion in real hourly earnings among the bottom of the wage distribution and, to a lesser extent, the middle part of the earnings distribution, thus reducing upper and lower tail inequality. This trend reversal is explained by a lower dispersion of earnings among workers with observable different attributes and by a much less extensive dispersion of residual labor inequality. Regarding the earnings differentials among workers with observable different attributes, the analysis concludes that the decline in labor inequality in Latin America has been closely associated with a reduction in the college/primary education premium and in the urban-rural earnings gap, coupled with a steady drop in the high school/primary education premium, which accelerated markedly since the 2000s, as well as a reduction in the experience premium across all age groups. -
Publication
Pro-Growth Equity: A Policy Framework for the Twin Goals
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-11)Growth is an important channel for poverty reduction. Policies to make growth more "inclusive" have permeated the development debate and "pro-poor growth" has been the subject of a wide range of papers in the literature, including issues related to measurement, modeling, and policy. However, the analytical and particularly empirical literature to support the idea that equity-enhancing policies have a positive effect on growth is more scarce and limited, especially on the potential policy links. This paper proposes a simple conceptual framework to identify the main elements that contribute to the income generation of households, building on the notion that growth can be seen partly as the aggregate outcome of the income generation capacity of households. The framework relies on an asset-based approach, and offers insights on how a more equitable distribution of assets and opportunities for their productive use can feed back into higher growth in the long term. Using this framework, the paper links the World Bank's twin goals to specific policy channels that have direct impacts on the income generation capacity of households, with a particular focus on households at the bottom of the income distribution. The four key policy channels include (i) implementing equitable, efficient and sustainable fiscal policy and macroeconomic management, (ii) strengthening fair and transparent institutions capable of delivering quality basic services, (iii) enabling well-functioning markets, and (iv) establishing adequate risk management instruments at the macro and household levels. -
Publication
Arithmetics and Politics of Domestic Resource Mobilization
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-04)The 2015 United Nations resolution on Financing for Development stresses the importance of effective resource mobilization and use of domestic resources to pursue sustainable development. The first Sustainable Development Goal is to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere by 2030. This paper proposes an accounting exercise to assess whether it is feasible for countries to eliminate poverty using only domestic resources, in other words, by mere redistribution. Moreover, the paper argues that the concentration of resources in the hands of fewer individuals in the society may hinder the feasibility of implementing effective fiscal policies (from the revenue side and the social spending side) to reduce poverty. The paper provides a new tool to assess the capacity of countries to eliminate poverty through redistribution, and a new tool to approximate the concentration of political influence in a country. The new methodologies are applied to the most recent surveys available for more than 120 developing countries. The findings show that countries with the same fiscal capacity to mobilize resources for poverty eradication differ widely in the political feasibility of such redistribution policies. -
Publication
Persistent Misallocation and the Returns to Education in Mexico
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01)Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers' earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the returns to education. This paper argues that distortions that misallocate resources toward less-productive firms explain these phenomena, because these firms are less intensive in well-educated workers compared with more-productive ones. It shows that while the relative supply of workers with more years of schooling has increased, misallocation of resources toward less productive firms has persisted. These two trends have generated a widening mismatch between the supply of, and the demand for, educated workers. The paper breaks down worker earnings into observable and unobservable firm and individual worker characteristics, and computes a counterfactual earnings distribution in the absence of misallocation. The main finding is that in the absence of misallocation average earnings would be higher, and that earnings differentials across schooling levels would widen, raising the returns to education. A no-misallocation path is constructed for the wage premium. Depending on parameter values, this path is found to be rising or constant, in contrast to the observed downward path. The paper concludes arguing that the persistence of misallocation impedes Mexico from taking full advantage of its investments in the education of its workforce. -
Publication
The Effects of Local Market Concentration and International Competition on Firm Productivity: Evidence from Mexico
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04)Although market concentration is one of the main impediments to productivity growth globally, data constraints have limited its analysis to developed countries or cross-country studies based on definitions of market concentration across nations and industries. This paper takes advantage of a database that is unusual by developing-country standards by means of leveraging the richness of five rounds of the Mexican Manufacturing Census between 1994 and 2014. The data allow estimation of the effects of local industry concentration on productivity. The main results show that a decline by 10 points in the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (on a 0-100 scale), a measure of market concentration, explains an increase by 1 percent in the total factor productivity of revenue. Local industry concentration also has heterogeneous effects on productivity across industries, while its impact on productivity varies by level of exposure to international markets. The results here show that the effect of greater exposure to trade offsets and, in most cases, reverses the negative effects of local concentration on productivity. These results are robust to specifications based on the estimation of firm productivity using the panels of establishment data from the 2009 and 2014 rounds of the economic census, to controlling for a proxy of markups, and to the use of alternate indicators of local industry concentration. -
Publication
Persistent Misallocation and the Returns to Education in Mexico
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06)Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers’ earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the returns to education. This paper argues that distortions that misallocate resources toward less-productive firms explain these phenomena, because these firms are less intensive in well-educated workers compared with more-productive ones. It shows that while the relative supply of workers with more years of schooling has increased, misallocation of resources toward less-productive firms has persisted. These two trends have generated a widening mismatch between the supply of, and the demand for, educated workers. The paper breaks down worker earnings into observable and unobservable firm and individual worker characteristics, and computes a counterfactual earnings distribution in the absence of misallocation. The main finding is that in the absence of misallocation average earnings would be higher, and that earnings differentials across schooling levels would widen, raising the returns to education. A no-misallocation path is constructed for the wage premium. Depending on parameter values, this path is found to be rising or constant, in contrast to the observed downward path. The paper concludes arguing that the persistence of misallocation impedes Mexico from taking full advantage of its investments in the education of its workforce.