Reduced Inequalities

This article discusses various hypotheses relating to the origin and operation of business groups in Mexico, and it proposes a model to explain the sources of their total asset growth. It highlights their growing contribution to Mexican gdp, but notes that their shares of employment and profits are smaller. Over time, sales and assets have clearly tended to become more concentrated in the largest groups. The paper concludes that the main financing sources for asset growth between 2005 and 2007 were firstly debt and secondly capital contributions from shareholders. It also finds that the leading groups invest discretely over time and tend to “overinvest” to block the entry of other competitors.

The present study focuses on the Indian flagship financial inclusion scheme – the Self Help Group-Bank Linkage Programme, which successfully leverages the social collateral concept and the vast network of bank branches in India to deliver financial services to small, cohesive and participatory women’s self-help groups. To develop a deeper understanding of the topic of sustainability of self-help groups, we propose a framework that conceptualizes sustainability by integrating the financial and organizational aspects of functioning of self-help groups. Sustainability is assessed in the light of the group’s performance (on set of indicators) with respect to the primary objective of the Self Help Group-Bank Linkage Programme, which is financial intermediation. Subsequently, we ascertain the effect of plausible contributory factors related to group management practices on the sustainability of self-help groups. The results of regression analysis on primary data captured from a survey of 170 self-help groups show that such factors as equitable access to credit, group savings, growth in savings, loan utilization in income generation activities, members depositing a savings contribution or loan installment on each other’s behalf, and distance from bank contribute significantly to group sustainability. Accordingly, designing suitable measures to monitor and improve group governance and management practices would be a critical policy intervention.

It is argued in these notes that a number of factors, together with the current problems in the world economy, tend to make integration appear less important than it really is and to reduce its chances of success, so that a clear interpretation and evaluation — not as yet available — is called for.

In this paper, I intend to emphasize aspects of the present system of international economic relations in the monetary and financial area that create difficulties for an adequate insertion of Latin America in the world economy. I do not propose to make a comprehensive study of all transfers of resources between developed and developing countries.

This article examines the effects of globalization on the trade union movement in developing countries (the “South”). It concludes, first, that globalization has been asymmetrical: much further-reaching for trade in goods than for capital flows, weak for technology transfer and very limited in migratory flows. Second, it examines the role and economic repercussions of labour unions. It finds that, contrary to the orthodox view, these have little negative impact on employment but do significantly reduce wage inequalities. In view of the shift in the South since the 1980s away from development strategies based on import substitution aimed at domestic markets and towards export-oriented strategies, the final section proposes new tasks and priorities for unions that are more consistent with this strategic reorientation, both at the national and international levels as well as within firms.

Accurate and reliable death statistics produced by civil registration and vital statistics systems are essential for health planning and programme evaluation. The quality of death registration data in Pacific island countries and territories remains suboptimal. Data on deaths occurring at sea are especially limited. While coastal and oceanic activities are the norm and essential to the livelihoods of Pacific island populations, such activities pose risks for accidents at sea, especially those involving small-scale vessels. In this paper, the scale of deaths at sea associated with small vessels in three Pacific island countries or territories over the period 2008-2017 is investigated using data from the health, civil registry, and police and fisheries departments, and reports produced by national statistics offices, ministries of health, the Pacific Community, the World Health Organization and media sources. Data on deaths at sea were found to be fragmented among multiple sources and missing key information on age, sex, and cause. Standardized procedures for reporting deaths and accidents at sea and harmonized data sharing between local communities and government agencies are urgently needed to improve civil registration and vital statistics systems and sea safety in the Pacific island subregion.

The article addresses the impacts of remittances in recipient countries in North and Central Asia, noting the high level of dependence of many countries of the subregion on remittances. While remittances are found to produce positive short-term benefits related to the reduction of transitory poverty, they also can contribute to negative impacts such as “Dutch Disease”, dollarization, public and private moral hazard. Few recipients make use of formal means of saving remittances, due to the lack of dedicated remittance-backed products, low levels of development of and trust in the financial sector, and lack of financial literacy among recipients of remittances. Measures to address this situation are proposed and assessed for their relevance to countries of the subregion.

The article considers the relationship between migration from Central Asia to the Russian Federation and gender relations. In particular, the paper describes the age-sex composition of the migration flows from three countries of the subregion (Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan) and discusses the case of Kyrgyzstan with its active female migration. Male migrants are more often employed in construction and are paid more than female migrants, who work mostly in trade and services. However, men and women show almost no difference in complying with migration laws, vulnerability in interactions with the state, relations with employers and apartment owners as well as transnational practices. The article also considers possibilities for family reunification, and gendered differences in inter-ethnic communication. The article concludes that further studies are required, and that assistance mechanisms are required for women who do not receive financial assistance from their migrant husbands. The article also finds that migrants’ sexual and reproductive behaviour is characterized by limited access to information about risks and also requires thorough study.

The paper provides an analysis on the impact of external sector openness and financial sector development on per capita income in the South Asian economies of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. For the annual series from 1980 to 2015, the instrumental variable model using a generalized method of moments (GMM) approach is estimated. The results show that liberalizing the external sector raises per capita income, conditional on the level of financial sector development. The large-economy influence analysis shows that India will benefit the most from external sector liberalization and other economies involved in this study still need to focus on financial sector development as opposed to on liberalizing capital flows. It further indicates that premature external liberalization in small and poor economies tends to be beneficial to the large neighbouring economy, which in this case is India, leading to resource exploitation. Accordingly, unless financial markets and institutions are strong enough to effectively deal with domestic resource mobilization, opening up the external sector alone may impede the economic development process.

The present paper provides estimates of the value of the digital economy of New Zealand through the use of the supply-use tables. By design, no changes are made to the production boundary as the products being assessed are already included within the production boundary and gross domestic product (GDP). The approach is a practical attempt at using the framework first presented in the paper entitled “Measuring digital trade: towards a conceptual framework”, and in particular, the “nature” component of the framework. This is extended to the whole economy to identify “digital” transactions in the country’s National Accounts Commodity Classification. The main finding from this paper is that the “digitally ordered” and “digitally delivered” aspects of the framework were able to be broadly applied. However, the significant material assumptions and the broad nature of the product classification at the aggregate level meant that our estimates were not of high quality. For the year ending March 2015, the estimate of the value of gross output of New Zealand that can be delivered digitally was 27.9 billion New Zealand dollars (NZ$) (US$18.8 billion), while for digitally ordered gross output, it was NZ$109.2 billion

Ten years after the appearance on the international agenda of the issue of technology transfer, a consensus seems to be emerging among the parties concerned —both technology suppliers and technology importers— that:

The development of the manufacturing sector has an important role to play in Latin America in relation to a long list of economic variables, all of which aim at changing the economic characteristics of the region in aspects such as the diversification of production, Structure of employment and production, growth of income and the average wage, and attenuation of the fluctuations in prices and export earnings, as will be seen in the following pages. Hence all measures tending to develop and consolidate this sector, whether through import substitution or exports of manufactures, merit special attention in the economic policy of the Latin American countries and the developing countries in general.

With the end of the 1970s at hand, by way of drawing up a general balance the author sketches the main features of Latin American development in the recent past and notes the main challenges which the region will have to face in the years to come. He begins by recognizing that since the war, and especially during the 1960s and the beginning of the present decade, Latin America achieved vigorous economic growth, but he stresses that this did not succeed in solving some of the most serious social problems, while it also brought with it a growing internationalization of the economies of the region, with a consequent increase in their external vulnerability. Furthermore, towards the middle of the 1970s there was a reversal of the expansive cycle as a result of the flagging performance of the central economies, the changes in the international prices of some goods, especially oil, and the internal difficulties faced by the national development patterns themselves.

This article deals with the fiscal and financial relations between the national government and the provincial governments in Argentina during the last 15 years, identifying the factors which help to explain the high degree of conflictivity of those relations. In view of the institutional roots of the conflict, a historical review is made in order to place the recent problems and future discussion in a long-term context. First of all, the development of federalism in Argentina and the evolution of the various forms of autonomy of the provinces is examined, followed, in the central section of the document, by a review of the options that have dominated the changes in the functions and incomes of the different levels of government in recent decades. Those options have to do not only with the distribution of taxes but also with the process of decentralization and the changes in functions among levels of government.

Demographic change in Latin America has been driven by the behaviour of the middle and upper strata. Given that fertility and mortality in these groups are now relatively low. future changes will mainly come from the behaviour of less advanced sectors. This paper analyses the contribution of these less advanced groups to the decline in fertility, distinguishing between the “distribution effect” and the “rates effect’. In less advanced sectors the desired number of children is lower than the actual number, with early marriage and limited use of modern contraceptives continuing to be the rule. Even so, these groups have entered the demographic transition. A number of countries have recently seen falls in their fertility rates due to the contribution of women with low levels of education: in the late transition countries behaviour is heterogeneous, while in the advanced transition countries the greatest contribution is being made by women with primary education.

This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made in the 1990s to introduce a market for water in Peru. This reform was thwarted because market operations were identified with water rights privatization, even though a market can perfectly well operate on a basis other than that of private rights, with the State retaining full ownership of the resource. The argument made here is that if these shortcomings were corrected, the creation of a water market would be desirable to improve allocation and management of water and to deal with the increasingly serious difficulties associated with the administration of water access, the lack of investment incentives and serious problems of efficiency and equity. The economic advantages and disadvantages of a water market are analysed, as are the legal and regulatory prerequisites for promoting the kind of market that would really improve water allocation in the increasingly necessary institutional reform of this sector in Peru.

This article aims to determine whether the geographical pattern of the external trade of foreign-owned enterprises in Brazil differs from that of domestic enterprises and whether, in the case of foreign enterprises, the region of origin of their capital is an important factor in determining that pattern, both in terms of the origin and destination of their imports and exports and with regard to the technological content of the pattern. The methodology employed was panel analysis, applied to a representative set of enterprises, using trade data broken down by region for 1989, 1997 and 2000.

Within the context of the evolution of world markets and new models of trade openness, several agrofood product lines in MERCOSUR countries have shown strong dynamism in recent decades, becoming focal points (axes) of accumulation and economic growth. The expansion of production and the higher levels of competitiveness achieved have been based on the organization of these product lines in networks or complexes; on the adoption of technology packages from abroad with minimal local adaptation, as part of the globalization of new paradigms; on the emergence or consolidation of groups of big firms in the main stages of these networks, and on clearly defined forms of insertion in external markets. This article argues that the transnationalization of relevant segments and markets of these complexes affects the possibilities of local or regional development, in particular, the generation of locally dense and diversified production networks with equitable distribution of rents, income and profits.

This paper builds on earlier studies of central bank independence (CBI), making a comparison of the rankings of central banks for 15 countries through three different indices. The analysis reveals that there is no shared concept of CBI and that the indices are a measure of the inflation bias. The Brazilian case is used as an example, with the objective of examining the impact on inflation of an increase in independence over time, as measured by Cukierman’s index. The findings indicate that CBI is a consequence of the conduct of monetary policy and that it is not an adequate framework for developing credibility.

This article makes an assessment of Argentina’s human resource skills in the field of information technology (IT). In various of the country’s government, business and academic domains the quality and potential of domestic human resources in this area is taken for granted- a belief based on the country’s rich, yet contradictory IT history, but not founded on an analysis of the corresponding skills. This study aims to develop and apply a methodology to evaluate the skills of IT workers and highlight their problems and potentials, using the results of an electronic survey. The current features and heterogeneity of those human resources are interpreted in the light of the progress and setbacks experienced by the activity during the course of its evolution.

This paper looks at Brazil’s fiscal policy during the two administrations of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso: 1995-1998 and 1998-2002. It stresses that the authorities’ austere attitude was as important as institutional and structural reform for the fiscal adjustment that followed the 1998-1999 crisis. The principal cause of the fiscal deterioration in 1995-1998 was the reduction in the primary balance rather than the increase in the interest burden, while the fiscal adjustment in 1999-2002 was largely due to increased revenues, as primary public expenditure by the federal government continued to grow in real terms. We consider the outlook for fiscal sustainability and conclude that, to preserve the country’s hard-won fiscal discipline, the austere fiscal attitude shown recently by the authorities should be permanently embedded into fiscal institutions.

The capacity of political regimes to formulate and implement policies in the common interest appears to be a crucial factor of development. Public institutions in Latin America are often characterized by a lack of common interest orientation. As a result, most countries of the region are ill-prepared to meet the challenges of global market integration and knowledge-based development. Two approaches have been particularly influential in linking institutions to economic development: the good governance approach, originally put forward by the World Bank, and the systemic competitiveness approach introduced by the German Development Institute. Drawing on insights from both concepts, this paper presents a framework for the assessment of reform blockades and propensities in given political systems. This is the “systemic governance” approach, and it focuses on the capacity to generate and implement decisions in the common interest at all levels of the political system. In order to promote second-generation adjustment reforms, the systemic character of governance has to be grasped.

The volatility of economic growth in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean has been exacerbated by a lack of suitable instruments for smoothing external shocks. Difficulties with the provision of emergency financing and the development of financial markets capable of trading government securities that incorporate better contingency mechanisms have contributed to economic volatility. To identify routes towards progress with these two issues in the Latin American context, the present article examines the role that could be played by regional and subregional financial institutions, always bearing in mind that while these can supplement global institutions, they cannot supplant them.

This article analyses the various dimensions of the “new poverty” which emerged during the 1980s and 1990s. It begins with a review of the definitions of the term in Europe, the United States and several Latin American countries. The case of Argentina is then examined, paying close attention to the pauperization of the middle class in that country at several points between the mid-1970s and the crisis of 2001. Structural poverty —an older phenomenon— is used as a point of reference to describe the characteristics of the new impoverishment, the adaptation strategies evolved to address it using cultural and social capital, the erosion of collective social identity and the urban dimension of pauperization. The article concludes with an analysis of the transformations experienced by the new poor since the issue was first examined, as well as the specific challenges it poses for public policy.