Economic Liberalization and Social Inequality in Mexico

描述(申请人提供)：在1990年代的十年间，世界各地的许多发展中国家经历了其国民经济的深刻变革。这些转变涉及贸易自由化、增加外国直接投资以及减少或重新定义国家在减轻贫困和促进福利方面的作用。也许没有哪个国家比墨西哥更能体现这一转变。在这十年中，墨西哥与美国和加拿大签署了一项全面的自由贸易协定，形成了世界第二大贸易集团。墨西哥也是外国直接投资总额最大的接收国之一。最后，墨西哥政府将其减贫战略调整为更有针对性的项目，旨在发展贫困家庭的人力资本。这项研究项目的总体目标是评估这些变化对100多个大都市地区的贫困和不平等的影响。评估经济自由化对收入分配的影响很重要，不仅因为不平等本身就是一个问题，而且还因为它已被证明对经济发展、政治稳定、卫生和教育结果以及暴力具有重要的负面影响。这项研究将使用1990年和2000年墨西哥人口普查的微观数据样本来估计在大都市一级发生的收入分配变化。关于在大都市地区经营的所有制造业和服务业公司的外国投资和贸易水平的信息将从1989年和1999年的经济普查中获得。固定效应模型将被用来估计随着时间的推移经济自由化对收入不平等和贫困的影响。最近开发的分解方法将使我们能够进一步区分外国投资回报的变化以及工人的社会人口特征对收入不平等变化的贡献(回报效应)，以及十年期间工人特征变化的贡献(人口效应)。其次，将采用多层次模型，将个人居民嵌套在大都市地区，以衡量外国投资和出口导向型生产水平对教育回报和工资性别差距的影响。最后，1990年和2000年人口普查的地理编码普查区域信息将用来衡量收入隔离的变化和贫困的空间集中程度。以前没有一项研究如此彻底地研究了经济自由化对地方一级收入分配的影响。由于所描述的经济变化并不是墨西哥独有的，这项研究的发现对亚洲和拉丁美洲的其他发展中国家具有直接影响。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): During the decade of the 1990s many developing countries throughout the world underwent profound transformations of their national economies. These transformations involved the liberalization of trade, an increase in foreign direct investment and the reduction or redefinition of the role of the state in alleviating poverty and promoting welfare. Perhaps no single country epitomizes this transformation more than Mexico. During this decade Mexico signed a sweeping free trade agreement with the United States and Canada forming the second largest trading bloc in the world. Mexico was also one of the largest recipients of total foreign direct investment. Finally, the Mexican government reoriented its strategy of poverty reduction towards more targeted programs aimed at developing the human capital of poor households. The overall goal of this research project is to estimate the effect of these changes on poverty and inequality in a sample of over 100 metropolitan areas. Assessing the impact of economic liberalization on the distribution of income is important not only because inequality is a problem in itself, but because it has also been shown to have important negative consequences for economic development, political stability, health and educational outcomes, and violence. The study will use micro-data samples of the 1990 and 2000 Mexican population censuses to estimate the changes in the income distribution that occurred at the metropolitan level. Information on the level of foreign investment and trade in all manufacturing and service-sector firms operating in a metropolitan area will be obtained from the 1989 and 1999 economic censuses. Fixed-effects models will be used to estimate the effect of economic liberalization on income inequality and poverty over time. A recently-developed decomposition method will allow us to further distinguish the contribution that changes in the returns to foreign investment as well as the sociodemographic characteristics of workers had on the change in income inequality (return effects) from the contribution of changes in the characteristics of workers during the decade (population effects). Second, multilevel models where individual residents are nested within metropolitan areas will be employed to measure the effect that the level of foreign investment and export-oriented production have on the payoffs to education and the gender gap in wages. Finally, geo-coded census tract information from the 1990 and 2000 censuses will be used to measure changes in income segregation and the spatial concentration of poverty over time. No previous study has so thoroughly examined the consequences of economic liberalization on the distribution of income at the local level. Because the economic changes described are not unique to Mexico, the findings from this study have direct implications for other developing countries in Asia and Latin America.