چه چیزی در پشت افزایش نابرابری دستمزد در مکزیک میباشد؟

We evaluate the impact of the educational expansion and changes in labor market institutions on wage inequality among Mexican workers using a simulation technique proposed by Knight and Sabot [The American Economic Review 73(5) (1983) 1132–1136]. We conclude that while increases in the relative rate of return of higher education would have induced an increase in wage inequality, changes in the composition of the educational distribution would have led to a stronger decline in wage inequality. Instead, increased wage inequality is largely explained by changes in Mexican labor market institutions; namely, unionization rate and minimum wages.

There is overwhelming evidence that since the mid-1980s Mexico has faced increasing income inequality.1 Among the different sources of income, wage inequality has contributed significantly to the increase in overall inequality. While the empirical evidence indicates that this is an international phenomenon,2 the Mexican experience has been accompanied by a generalized decline in overall average wages.3 In the literature there are three competing explanations about increasing wage inequality: changes in relative demand of skilled labor—caused by either trade liberalization or technical progress—changes in relative supply, and changes in labor market institutions.4 The Mexican literature, however, has stressed changes in relative demand in its two versions: trade liberalization and increasing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). To a large extent these latter two events coincided with the change in economic policy that the government began implementing during the mid-1980s. The trade argument can be summarized as follows: the opening of the economy induced the expansion of the export-oriented industries at the expense of the import-competing ones. Given that the export-oriented industries are intensive in skilled labor, this expansion induced higher demand for skilled labor relative to the demand for unskilled labor. Higher relative demand for skilled labor,

The model used in this essay is a very simple one and yet it provides some insights about the leading forces behind increasing wage inequality. We conclude that the impact of the increases in the relative rate of return to higher education were outpaced by the effects of labor mobility that occurred simultaneously, so that the overall effect of educational expansion on wage inequality was a decline. Instead, what seem to be behind the increasing wage inequality are changes in labor market institutions. In this essay we have considered changes in the degree of unionization and changes in minimum wages. We found that the wage dispersion is largely explained by changes in the composition and in the rate of return of unionization.