توسعه و توزیع درآمد: مورد پورتوریکو

Using data spanning half a century the study addresses the trends and factors behind changes in income distribution in one of the earliest examples of development through integration to the world economy. Results show remarkable income growth that generated an ambiguous long-term change in inequality but a drastic reduction in poverty. Public transfers played a decisive role in restraining growth in inequality and in reducing poverty levels that were also affected favorably by changes in the distribution of female earned income. Finally, although rising schooling levels and their absolute returns increased households' income generating capacities, the realization of the potential was hindered by increasing levels of unemployment and economic inactivity.

In the decade of the 1950s Puerto Rico embarked on what was then a novel development strategy based not on an internal development process but on the attraction of foreign direct investment through the provision of generous tax incentives and considerable spending in infrastructure.1 Evaluation of the Island's early experience was resoundingly positive and the model was recommended as one to be emulated by other developing countries (Baer, 1959). But, subsequent analyses performed in the context of economic crises related to the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s were not as enthusiastic, and the discussion revolved at best about the limits of the model to its utter failure at worst (Dietz, 1986; Meléndez, 1990; Weisskoff, 1985). More recent work by Baumol and Wolff (1996) placing Puerto Rico in an international context concluded that while the economy's speed of growth receded after the mid-1970s, the model still produced impressive results in per capita GDP growth that placed the Island among the world's top performers during 1950–90. The authors argued that the Puerto Rican experience held valuable lessons for developing countries and provided an important counterexample to the Asian model. The objective of this study is that of adding another dimension to the debate in analyzing the distributional consequences of the strategy. The long-held belief that inequality increases with growth before it declines has given way to the proposition that the type rather than the stage of growth holds the key to the understanding of the factors that cause distribution to change (Fields, 2001). The Puerto Rican experience is of special interest as it represents one of the earliest examples of development through integration to the world economy. Results will show that over the long-term Puerto Rican outward-oriented growth has been effective in reducing poverty and more so in raising market incomes at the higher end of the distribution. Such effects have not produced considerably greater levels of household income dispersion due to the stabilizing effects of transfer payments that also account for a considerable share of the recent progress in alleviating poverty. The fact that countries such as Taiwan and South Korea have been able to achieve trade-based growth with significantly less market income pressure on inequality (see Bourguignon, Fournier, & Gurgand, 2001; Fields & Yoo, 2000) and reliance on transfers suggests that the relevant issue connecting growth and income distribution is indeed the specifics of how growth is achieved rather than its stage. Sections 2 and 3 survey the literature and lay out the data sources and trends in income distribution over 1953–99 when the Island transformed itself from an agrarian to an industrial to a service-based economy. Section 4 discusses and implements a methodology for analyzing the role of important income sources on changes in distribution while Section 5 examines the issue of poverty from the viewpoint of self-reliance. Section 6 concludes with a summary and a discussion of the implications of results.

The Puerto Rican experience in development through integration to the world economy has been characterized by strong income growth that has not been restricted to the higher end of the distribution. Poverty has fallen sharply, especially during the early stages of development when the FGT(2) index nearly halved in a span of a decade. Inequality has followed a less consistent path in increasing mildly during the early stages of growth, declining during 1969–89, and increasing during the 1990s, with the net effect being of an ambiguous nature for the entire period under analysis. Perhaps of greater interest than the trends themselves are the reasons behind them, with those driving changes during the early stage of development difficult to ascertain because of lack of microdata. But, the fact that 90% of the significant increases in household incomes experienced during the period can be associated with changes in earned income sources suggests that they were at the center of the changes in distribution. The low-growth decades of the 1970s and 1980s turned out to be a far different story where the positive developments in the distribution front were driven almost exclusively by increased flows of public transfers from the United States. While these continued to play a positive role during the expansionary decade of the 1990s, they were reinforced by poverty-reducing changes in the distribution of earned income. A further decomposition by gender reveals that throughout the period under analysis changes in the distribution of male earnings were a consistent source of increased inequality while those occurring among women were consistently poverty-reducing. Interestingly, official poverty reduction lagged far behind the falling levels of self-reliant poverty. While trends in schooling levels and their absolute returns considerably improved the income generating capacity of Puerto Rican households, growing unemployment and economic inactivity limited the realization of the rising potential. Hence, the problem of unemployment cited in Baumol and Wolff (1996) as the one blemish in the Puerto Rican development experience comes back to “haunt” its income distribution record. While producing respectable growth in product and wages, the development model has been found lacking in employment creation, placing increasing reliance on public transfers for positive changes in the distribution front. If the model has lost employment-generating steam or never had much is a matter of debate, but Dietz (2003) argues that the continued success of the Asian economies vis-View the MathML source-vis Puerto Rico can be explained in terms of differences in the sequencing of development paths. Asian economies used easy import substitution opportunities to build a local base of entrepreneurs capable of advancing to a phase of export substitution of easily manufactured for primary goods. The latter served as further base for progressing to phases of difficult import and export substitution. In contrast, Puerto Rico largely attempted to jump to a phase of difficult export substitution through the use of foreign capital and know-how. Not only were relatively more labor-absorbing phases skipped, but the Island failed to form a broad local entrepreneurial class that grew in the Asian economies through cooperation between public and private sectors in the form of reward and penalty mechanisms. These differences in historical paths, productive, and distributive performances serve as valuable lessons for countries embarking on a trade-based growth strategy and for Puerto Rico itself in its quest of achieving a higher level of development.