CEPAL Review - Volume 2011, Issue 104, 2011

The argument that I will be making here is that the key to a well-designed macroeconomic policy for development is a mix of sound countercyclical policies and a proactive strategy for diversifying production structures. These two concepts are deeply rooted in eclac thinking. Countercyclical policies must withstand the challenges posed by abrupt external financing cycles and sharp fluctuations in commodity prices. Fiscal policy is of pivotal importance, but it must be coupled with equally countercyclical monetary and exchange-rate policies. In the light of the experience over the past decade, this policy mix seems to be achievable if intermediate exchange regimes are introduced alongside macroprudential policies, including regulation of capital flows. At the same time, the strategy used to spur the development of the production sector should foster innovative economic activities that generate domestic production linkages. The concept of innovation must be understood in a broad sense, but the critical test is its contribution to the accumulation of technological capabilities.

The work done here involved estimating the extent of bullying in Latin American schools and its impact on the academic achievement of primary school students. Pupils’ socio-demographic characteristics were analysed and linked with bullying. Three- and four-multilevel models were applied to data from the Second Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (serce) conducted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (unesco), analysing 2,969 schools, 3,903 classrooms and 91,223 sixth-grade students in 16 Latin American countries (not including Mexico for the association between school bullying and academic performance). The study found that bullying is a serious problem throughout the region; students who suffer peer aggression yield a significantly lower performance in reading and math than those who do not; and those in classrooms with more episodes of physical or verbal violence perform worse than those in less violent classroom settings.

This article analyses the main determinants of competitiveness in the Caribbean tourism stay-over industry using panel data for the period 1995-2006, based on an augmented version of an empirical model by Craigwell (2007). The ex post measure of competitiveness used is the share of world outbound tourists from Canada, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America arriving in a Caribbean destination. The study finds evidence that Caribbean tourism competitiveness can be enhanced through policy measures that favour, among others, increases in investment, private sector development, better infrastructure, lower government consumption, a more flexible labour market, reduced vulnerability to natural disasters, higher human development and slow rises in oil prices. This article is an attempt to fill the gap on econometric research relating to tourism competitiveness for the Caribbean region.

This article outlines the changes that occurred in employment between 2004 and 2009 and reviews the links that households established with the labour market. An increase in the number of jobs registered with the social security system was one of the key features of the period. Moreover, half of the rise in the observed employment rate represented jobs obtained by household members other than heads of household. The increase in protected employment also benefited social sectors that have traditionally been neglected, although there are factors that restrict the access of certain population groups to such jobs. Another research finding is that if the head of the household has a protected job, other household members have better chances of gaining a similar job themselves.

This article studies the exceptional industrial growth that occurred in Argentina between 2003 and 2008. In addition to reviewing aggregate indicators of this growth, the article discusses evidence of changes in sector shares during these years along with a number of specific features in the trend of manufacturing employment. It also analyses the main patterns of Argentine industry’s external trade in that period. These contain positive features such as greater relative participation by local production in external markets, and the emergence of a new group of domestic firms with rapidly growing manufacturing exports. Alongside this, and as a residual structural characteristic, imports are supplying an increasing share of the domestic demand for manufactured goods.

This article attempts to explain how the innovation process is determined by factors external to the firm, whose productivity is calculated and analysed in terms of systemic innovation factors. To that end, it describes the internal innovation capabilities of firms, which explain variations in their productivity across sectors. The productivity of manufacturing firms is constructed using the Abramovitz residual method (social accounting), referred to as total factor productivity (tfp), or the Solow residual. Nonetheless, a number of theoretical problems are avoided, such as the effect of scale, aggregation and the heterogeneity of the factors considered in the model. The tfp of Brazilian manufacturing firms is explained by their internal capabilities and by product innovation in the sector to which they belong, which shows that innovation depends on institutions located within the industry.

This paper studies the relationships between investment in research and development (r&d), innovation and productivity in the Chilean manufacturing industry using data from four waves of the national Technological Innovation Survey during the past decade. The analysis is based on a multi-equation model that takes into account the whole process of innovation, considering the determinants of firms’ decisions to engage in innovation activities, the results of those efforts in terms of innovation and their impact on productivity. It is found that: (a) larger plants are more likely to invest in r&d, (b) r&d intensity increases the probability of process innovation, (c) r&d intensity does not affect the probability of product innovation, (d) low appropriability reduces the probability of process innovation, (e) larger firms are more likely to introduce product innovation, and (f) process innovation increases productivity.

The quality gap in education between Chilean schools with different administrative structures (especially in the case of municipal schools and private subsidized schools) has long been a subject of analysis and discussion within the wider debate surrounding the relative efficiency and role of public education. Unconditioned differences in the results of standardized tests that point to higher levels of quality in private schools diminish when sociodemographic factors are controlled for, but the question as to what control variables should be used and which methodology is the most appropriate, as well as the extent of the reduction, all continue to be a subject of debate. Here we undertake a meta-analysis of 17 of the main studies that have been done on the subject. The analysis shows how sensitive the results are to the controls and estimation methods that are used. In the aggregate, private subsidized schools score approximately four points higher than municipal schools do. This is a statistically significant and educationally relevant differential.

The work described in this article takes an approach based on duality theory to examine the impact of public infrastructures on manufacturing productivity in Colombia between 1990 and 2005. The effect on the manufacturing cost structure of public capital investment is analysed by means of the substitution or complementarity among the various factors of private production and public capital.

The paper argues that the weak effect of exports on gdp growth in Mexico is partly explained by two features of the Mexican economy that arose subsequent to trade liberalization: the peso’s continued real appreciation and the large and rising share of the maquila sector in manufacturing exports. The argument is developed through an analytical example for a stationary economy with no investment. As motivation for the example’s main assumptions, the paper presents empirical evidence gathered from the country’s Annual Industrial Survey and the estimation of cointegration equations for maquila and non-maquila intermediate imports. The empirical evidence shows that (a) exports are highly dependent on imports and thus benefit from trade liberalization, and (b) while real exchange rate changes can induce substitution between local and imported intermediate goods generally, this is not the case in the maquila sector.