Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The manufacturing business growth-profitability relationship is analyzed for Coahuila, Mexico, during 1993-2018. Business activity is one of the engines generating employment usually subordinate to the level of profitability. Entrepreneurial theories disagree on impact and causality: business growth promotes profitability (classical view), profitability generates business growth (evolutionary), or domains a negative link (managerial hypothesis) that can be bidirectional. Nonlinear dynamic panel methods and piecewise regressions estimate positive impacts ranging from profitability to business growth, but they diminish after to reach a threshold value. The analysis is delimited by the sectoral aggregation, but findings are intuitive and contribute to the understanding of the business dynamic. It is concluded that opportunities of gains create scale economies that stimulate the expansion of the productive plant, however, macroeconomic conditions are required to encourage the private investment and to reduce the market restrictions.

The general objective of this paper is to estimate, in Mexico’s case, the impact of commercial bank credit on economic activity in the whole manufacturing sector, and seven selected manufacturing industries. Unlike the literature that has studied the effects of bank credit in the Mexican economy, this research finds evidence (through ARDL-bounds models) of a positive and significant impact of bank credit on production for the whole sector and the following industries: i) food, ii) beverage and tobacco, iii) paper, iv) non-metallic mineral-based products, and v) transport equipment manufacturing; along with significant effects from fixed investment in machinery and equipment, and the real interest rate. In addition, we did not find evidence that loan concentration affects manufacturing production. Due to these results, this study postulates that bank credit matters as a stimulus of industrial activity, and it would be worth designing policies that strengthen and deepen such impacts. Resumen El objetivo general de este trabajo es estimar, para el caso de México, el impacto del crédito bancario sobre la actividad económica del sector manufacturero y de siete subsectores manufactureros seleccionados. A diferencia de la literatura que ha estudiado los efectos del crédito bancario en la economía mexicana, este trabajo encuentra evidencia (a través de modelos ARDL-bounds) de un impacto positivo y significativo del crédito bancario sobre la producción para el total del sector y las siguientes industrias: i) alimentos, ii) bebidas y tabaco, iii) papel, iv) productos minerales no metálicos, y v) producción de equipo de transporte; junto con efectos significativos de la inversión fija en maquinaria y equipo, y la tasa de interés real. Adicionalmente, no se halló evidencia de que la concentración del crédito afecte a la producción manufacturera. Debido a estos resultados, este trabajo postula que el crédito bancario sí importa como estímulo de la actividad industrial, y valdría la pena diseñar políticas que fortalezcan y profundicen tales impactos.

La informalidad laboral se ha vuelto un tema recurrente en la literatura sobre mercados laborales, sobre todo por su persistencia en países en vías de desarrollo. Para el caso de México, en los últimos años ha tomado relevancia su discusión desde diversas perspectivas analíticas. Para responder la interrogante de qué factores explican el fenómeno de estudio, se estiman Modelos Autorregresivos de Rezagos Distribuidos, por sus siglas en inglés (ARDL), en donde la informalidad laboral es la variable de interés. Se utilizan datos de series de tiempo para el periodo de 2005-2019 en frecuencia trimestral. Los resultados de estimación indican que, en el largo plazo, el crecimiento económico per cápita real y la escolaridad de nivel medio y superior contribuyen a reducir la informalidad. También se encuentra que la acción del gobierno a través del gasto público per cápita, permite atenuar la informalidad. Los resultados permiten sostener la idea de que es un fenómeno complejo y multifactorial. Abstract Labor informality has become a recurring theme in the literature on labor markets, especially due to its persistence in developing countries. In the case of Mexico, in recent years its discussion has become relevant from various analytical perspectives. To answer the question of what factors, explain the phenomenon under study, Autoregressive Models of Distributed Lags (ARDL) are estimated, where labor informality is the variable of interest. Time series data are used for the period 2005-2019 in quarterly frequency. The estimation results indicate that in the long term, real per capita economic growth and secondary and higher education contribute to reducing informality. It is also found that the action of the government through public spending per capita, allows to mitigate informality. The results support the idea that it is a complex and multifactorial phenomenon.

Venezuelans constitute the group of immigrants in Spain that has most grown in recent years, targeting the most urbanized areas of the country, over all of Madrid, the Canary Islands and Catalonia. In this work we propose to characterize the Venezuelan immigration in the city of Madrid, under the hypothesis that the content social and economic situation of said migrations is very diverse, not constituting a typical migration group as it happens with other immigrant groups in Spain. The methodology used combines the quantitative analysis of statistical data with qualitative techniques. As the main contribution of the research, we highlight the guidelines of residential location of Venezuelans in Madrid, these do not coincide with those of the groups of immigrants with more presence in the city (Ecuadorians, Colombians, Romanians, Moroccans...), are concentrated in neighborhoods in the northeast of the capital, along with central almond districts such as Salamanca.

The Spanish swine industry contributes 14% of the entire agricultural production, being a significant component of the national economy. However, intensive livestock farms involve a risk to environmental and public health. Nitrate leaching losses from slurry discharge to surface and groundwater have become a severe environmental problem nowadays. This study used remote sensing techniques to analyze a collection of Sentinel-2 satellite images to evaluate reflectivity of slurry discharges. Summer and winter period images from 2015 to 2022 were used to determine the spectral response of two plots, one of the slurry discharges and another one of the control plots. The acquired results showed significant changes in soil moisture and land cover, which could be related to the slurry discharge. Although, these data are not exempt from uncertainty, which could be affected by differences in soil structure, texture and composition, by climatic phenomena, as well as by the characteristics of the satellite images used (capture frequency and spatial-spectral resolution of the sensor). Despite the limitations, it proved that variations in the discharge plot show a greater spectral change in the summer months than in winter due to the differences in humidity detected in the mid-infrared spectrum (SWIR).

Mexico, among the OECD countries, is the country with the greatest difference in income between rich and poor. This situation has been accompanied by high levels of perception of corruption. The goal is to show that corruption and income inequality are correlated. The estimates are affected by the endogeneity problem caused by the two-way causality of corruption and income inequality, and by measurement errors of the variable used for corruption. Therefore, the method of simultaneous equations is used and it is estimated by error-component two stage least squares (EC2SLS), alternatively the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and sys-GMM are used, to analyze the sensitivity of the results. Robust evidence is found of a positive relationship between corruption and income inequality in Mexico in the period 2010-2020.

Using data from nationally and regionally representative household surveys, we analyze the association between the changes in coefficients of dummy variables for higher education degrees in the wage equation and evolution of wage inequality in Chile from 2013-2017. Employing a decomposition method using unconditional quantile regressions, we find that a significant decline in the coefficients of professional degrees, especially from new private universities, with a larger magnitude at upper quantiles, is associated with a substantial reduction in wage inequality. The results are robust to the correction for sample selection bias and control for workers’ occupation and firm size categories.

The co-existence of external referencing pricing (ERP) and reimbursement policy is common in many countries. Thus, this research examines whether or not the imposition of ERP is socially desirable in the presence of reimbursement policy. For direct sales channel, we find that the home social welfare is worse-off with ERP if the home copayment rate is too high. Our main results are robust under indirect sales channel. Moreover, the home social welfare under the pharmacypurchasing-price (PPP) ERP is larger than that under the ex-factory-price (EFP) ERP if the home copayment rate is high enough. Finally, the profit of brand-name firm under indirect sales channel is higher than that under direct sales channel if the home copayment rate is too high.

Taking advantage of a reform that made Chile’s most popular conditional cash transfer program substantially more generous, I study its impact on mothers’ labor supply using a difference-in-difference strategy. Previous research has focused on these effects near the inauguration of CCTs, never before more than 20 years later. I find that older mothers respond to the reform by increasing their probability of working, but young mothers between 18 and 24 years old reduce their labor force participation. Meanwhile, intensive margin responses are always non-positive. This is policy-relevant information to many countries with CCTs today.

The effect of Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. However, the indirect effects of environmental policies in the process were not sufficiently considered. This study uses a panel threshold methodology to examine the nonlinear impact of environmental policy stringency on the relationship between FDIs and GHG emissions in 25 OECD countries. Our results show a negative relationship between FDIs and GHG emissions if the countries have environmental policy stringency index above a threshold level of (2.22). The results are also supported by the fixed effects model, which indicates a threshold effect of (2.88). The threshold effect is mostly due to the stringency of nonmarket-based environmental policies.