Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Is Mexico A Lumpy Country?

Contents:

Author Info

  • Andrew B. Bernard
  • Raymond Robertson
  • Peter K. Schott

Abstract

Mexico's experience before and after trade liberalization presents a challenge to neoclassical trade theory. Though labor abundant, it nevertheless exported skill-intensive goods and protected labor-intensive sectors prior to liberalization. Post-liberalization, the relative wage of skilled workers rose. Courant and Deardorff (1992) have shown theoretically that an extremely uneven distribution of factors within a country can induce behavior at odds with overall comparative advantage. We demonstrate the importance of this insight for developing countries. We show that Mexican regions exhibit substantial variation in skill abundance, offer significantly different relative factor rewards, and produce disjoint sets of industries. This heterogeneity helps to both undermine Mexico's aggregate labor abundance and motivate behavior that is more consistent with relative skill abundance.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10898.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 10898.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: Nov 2004
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10898

Note: ITI
Contact details of provider:
Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Phone: 617-868-3900
Email:
Web page: http://www.nber.org
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Verhoogen, Eric, 2007. "Trade, Quality Upgrading and Wage Inequality in the Mexican Manufacturing Sector," IZA Discussion Papers 2913, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  2. Andrew Bernard & Stephen Redding & Peter Schott, 2005. "Factor Price Equality and the Economies of the United States," Working Papers 05-21, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
  3. Wood, Adrian, 1997. "Openness and Wage Inequality in Developing Countries: The Latin American Challenge to East Asian Conventional Wisdom," World Bank Economic Review, World Bank Group, vol. 11(1), pages 33-57, January.
  4. Debaere, Peter & Demiroglu, Ufuk, 2003. "On the similarity of country endowments," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 101-136, January.
  5. Donald R. Davis & David E. Weinstein, 1998. "An Account of Global Factor Trade," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 1849, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
  6. Peter K. Schott, 2001. "One Size Fits All? Heckscher-Ohlin Specialization in Global Production," NBER Working Papers 8244, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  7. Lucinda Vargas, 1999. "The binational importance of the maquiladora industry," The Southwest Economy, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, issue Nov, pages 1-5.
  8. Deardorff, Alan V., 1994. "The possibility of factor price equalization, revisited," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(1-2), pages 167-175, February.
  9. Gordon H. Hanson, 2003. "What Has Happened to Wages in Mexico since NAFTA?," NBER Working Papers 9563, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  10. Repetto, A. & Ventura, J., 1997. "The Leontief-Trefler Hypothesis and Factor Price Insensitivity," Working papers 97-13, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
  11. Debaere, Peter, 2004. "Does lumpiness matter in an open economy?: Studying international economics with regional data," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 485-501, December.
  12. Gordon H. Hanson & Ann Harrison, 1995. "Trade, Technology, and Wage Inequality," NBER Working Papers 5110, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  13. Esquivel, Gerardo & Rodriguez-Lopez, Jose Antonio, 2003. "Technology, trade, and wage inequality in Mexico before and after NAFTA," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 543-565, December.
  14. Courant, P.N. & Deardorff, A.V., 1989. "International Trade With Lumpy Countries," Papers 90-04, Michigan - Center for Research on Economic & Social Theory.
  15. Leamer, Edward E, 1987. "Paths of Development in the Three-Factor, n-Good General Equilibrium Model," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(5), pages 961-99, October.
  16. Revenga, Ana, 1997. "Employment and Wage Effects of Trade Liberalization: The Case of Mexican Manufacturing," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 15(3), pages S20-43, July.
  17. Roberto Alvarez & Raymond Robertson, 2004. "Exposure to foreign markets and plant-level innovation: evidence from Chile and Mexico," Journal of International Trade & Economic Development, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 13(1), pages 57-87.
  18. Robert C. Feenstra & Gordon H. Hanson, 1995. "Foreign Direct Investment and Relative Wages: Evidence from Mexico's Maquiladoras," NBER Working Papers 5122, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  19. Robertson, Raymond, 2004. "Relative prices and wage inequality: evidence from Mexico," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 387-409, December.
  20. Hanson, Gordon H, 1997. "Increasing Returns, Trade and the Regional Structure of Wages," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(440), pages 113-33, January.
  21. Cragg, Michael Ian & Epelbaum, Mario, 1996. "Why has wage dispersion grown in Mexico? Is it the incidence of reforms or the growing demand for skills?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 99-116, October.
  22. Raymond Robertson, 2000. "Trade Liberalisation and Wage Inequality: Lessons from the Mexican Experience," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 23(6), pages 827-849, 06.
  23. Topel, Robert H, 1986. "Local Labor Markets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 94(3), pages S111-43, June.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Pol Antras & Luis Garicano & Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, 2005. "Offshoring in a Knowledge Economy," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 2067, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
  2. David G. Atkin, 2012. "Endogenous Skill Acquisition and Export Manufacturing in Mexico," NBER Working Papers 18266, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  3. Steven Brakman & Charles van Marrewijk, 2011. "Lumpy Countries, Urbanization, and Trade," CESifo Working Paper Series 3669, CESifo Group Munich.
  4. Andreas Waldkirch, 2010. "The Effects of Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico since NAFTA," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(5), pages 710-745, 05.
  5. Kaplan, David S. & Lederman, Daniel & Robertson, Raymond, 2012. "What drives short-run labor market volatility in offshoring industries ? evidence from northern Mexico during 2007-2009," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6268, The World Bank.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10898

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.