Mexico: a Decade of Falling Inequality: Market Forces Or State Action? Gerardo Esquivel, Nora Lustig, and John Scott
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07-0410-2 CH 7:Cohen-Easterly 3/17/10 8:47 PM Page 175 7 Mexico: A Decade of Falling Inequality: Market Forces or State Action? gerardo esquivel, nora lustig, and john scott exico is among the most unequal countries in the world.1 However, it is Mmaking progress in becoming less unequal: from 1996 to 2006, Mexico’s Gini coefficient fell from 0.543 to 0.498 (or by 0.8 percent a year),2 and from 2000 to 2006 it fell by 1 percent a year.3 The decline in inequality coincided with 1. The authors are grateful to participants in the UNDP project “Markets, the State, and the Dynam- ics of Inequality in Latin America,” coordinated by Nora Lustig and Luis Felipe López Calva, as well as to participants in seminars at the United Nations offices in New York and Mexico City, the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association meeting in Rio de Janeiro, and the Latin American Studies Associa- tion meeting in Rio de Janeiro. We also are very grateful to Mary Kwak and anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions and to Fedora Carbajal as well as Edith Cortés, Francisco Islas, and Mariellen Malloy Jewers for their outstanding research assistance. 2. The Gini reported in this paragraph is calculated by using total income (which includes monetary income and nonmonetary income, such as the imputed value of owner-occupied housing and auto- consumption, but does not include capital gains). The decomposition of income inequality by source pre- sented in this chapter uses current monetary income (which excludes capital gains and nonmonetary income). The income concept in both cases is assumed to be after monetary transfers, direct taxes, and social security contributions (that is, it is disposable income). For the incidence analysis, the income concept used to rank households is total current income (including nonmonetary income but excluding capital gains) per capita before transfers and indirect taxes but net of direct taxes, as reported in ENIGH, the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditures (see INEGI, various years). The same concept is used for market income when comparing the distribution of total transfers and taxes with market income (to estimate incidence and change in inequality), except that market income in this case is net of all taxes, not just direct taxes. 3. The change in the Gini coefficient between 1996 and 2006, 1996 and 2000, and 2000 and 2006 was found to be statistically significant at the 95 percent level. The confidence intervals were constructed 175 07-0410-2 CH 7:Cohen-Easterly 3/17/10 8:47 PM Page 176 176 gerardo esquivel, nora lustig, and john scott important changes in Mexico’s economic and social policy. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada went into effect, thereby establishing the largest free trade area in the world—and the most asymmetrical in terms of the countries’ relative GDP.4 Mexico also implemented two important government transfer programs: Procampo in 1994 and Progresa (later called Oportunidades) in 1997. Procampo is an income sup- port program for farmers designed to help them face the transition costs resulting from the opening of agricultural trade under NAFTA. Progresa/Oportunidades is a targeted conditional cash transfer program; it is considered Mexico’s most im - portant antipoverty program. The period of declining inequality, which coincided with the period in which NAFTA went into effect, saw significant variation in annual growth rates. The peso crisis that began in December 1994 led to a sharp decline in economic activ- ity during 1995, when per capita GDP fell to the tune of 8 percent.5 The econ- omy recovered quickly, and between 1996 and 2000 Mexico’s per capita GDP grew at a rate of 4 percent a year. However, between 2000 and 2006, per capita GDP growth slowed to 1 percent a year. That low-growth period is precisely when income inequality started to decline more rapidly. This chapter uses nonparametric decomposition methods to analyze the prox- imate determinants of the reduction in income inequality between the mid-1990s and 2006. In particular, it looks at the roles played by the reduction in both labor income inequality and nonlabor income inequality. It also analyzes the impact of changes in demographics, such as the numbers of adults and of working adults per household. The chapter examines the extent to which the reduction in labor income inequality was due to a decline in the wage skill premium and explores the influence of changes in labor force composition, in terms of education and experience, on the decline in the wage skill premium; it also examines the rela- tionship between labor force composition and changes in public spending on education.6 It then analyzes the contribution of changes in government transfers, with particular emphasis on Progresa/Oportunidades, to the reduction in nonla- bor income inequality. The chapter concludes with a look at the distributive impact of government redistributive spending and taxes using standard incidence analysis. by applying the bootstrap method with 150 replications. There is Lorenz dominance for the comparisons of 2006 and 1996, 2006 and 2000, and 2000 and 1996. 4. See Tornell and Esquivel (1997) for more details on these issues. 5. For an analysis of the peso crisis, see Lustig (1998). 6. For a theoretical discussion of the relationship between educational expansion, the supply of skills, and labor earnings inequality see, for example, chapter 2, by Jaime Kahhat, in this volume. 07-0410-2 CH 7:Cohen-Easterly 3/17/10 8:47 PM Page 177 mexico: a decade of falling inequality 177 Income Inequality after NAFTA: 1994–2006 In this chapter we use the Gini coefficient as our preferred measure of inequality.7 It has all the desirable properties of an inequality indicator,8 and it is decompos- able by proximate determinants as well as income sources.9 Our analysis uses both total income per capita and total monetary income per capita.10 All of our esti- mates use information from the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditures (ENIGH).11 Comparable surveys are available for the years 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2006.12 The surveys capture income net of taxes and contributions to social security and include transfers from Pro- campo and Progresa/Oportunidades. Figure 7-1 shows the evolution of the Gini coefficient for 1984–2006, using alternative definitions of income. The figure clearly indicates an inverted-U pat- tern with its peak in the mid-1990s. After rising by several percentage points between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the Gini coefficient for total household per capita income declined from 0.543 to 0.498 (and the Gini for monetary household per capita income declined from 0.539 to 0.506) between 1996 and 2006. The pace of decline accelerated between 2000 and 2006, when the Gini fell at 1 percent a year. Other measures of inequality follow the same general trend as the Gini coefficient, although some differences arise from the fact that the Gini is more sensitive to what happens to the middle of the distribution while the other measures are more heavily influenced by changes at the top and the bottom.13 For example, although the other measures tend to peak around 1998, the Gini peaks in 1994.14 7. Other measures of inequality such as the Theil index show trends similar to those described in the text. They are available from the authors on request. 8. These principles are: adherence to the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle; symmetry; independence of scale; homogeneity; and decomposability. 9. Although it is not additively decomposable, as is the Theil index. 10. Income includes labor income and nonlabor income. The former includes all the income that is reported as labor income in ENIGH, including labor income of the self-employed. Nonlabor income includes income from own businesses; income from assets (including capital gains), pensions (public and private), public tranfers (Oportunidades and Procampo), and private transfers (for example, remittances); and nonmonetary income (imputed rent on owner-occupied housing and consumption of own production, common in poor rural areas). Official poverty measures in Mexico use net current income—that is, capital gains, gifts, and in-kind transfers to other households subtracted from current total income. Current mon- etary income, the concept used in the decomposition of inequality by source presented below, does not include nonmonetary income and consumption of own production and excludes capital gains. 11. In Spanish, Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (ENIGH). 12. Surveys for 1984 and 1989 are not as comparable, but they are still used for lack of a better alternative. 13. Sen and Foster (1973). 14. See Esquivel (2008). 07-0410-2 CH 7:Cohen-Easterly 3/17/10 8:47 PM Page 178 178 gerardo esquivel, nora lustig, and john scott Figure 7-1. Gini Coefficients for Alternative Income Definitions, 1984–2006a Gini coefficient 0.58 0.56 0.54 0.52 0.50 0.48 1984 1989 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 Current Monetary Income (CMI) Labor Income CMI w/o Transfers CMI w/o Remmitances Current Total Income Source: Esquivel (2008). a. Current income excludes capital gains and income from the sale of durable goods. The evolution of Mexico’s income distribution can also be analyzed by using the growth incidence curves (GICs) suggested by Ravallion and Chen.15 These curves show the percent change in per capita income along the entire income distribution between two points in time. Figure 7-2 shows the GIC for 1996– 2006, 1996–2000, and 2000–06, constructed using total per capita income.