Rentier States and Geography in Mexico's Development

This paper provides a long-term historical and econometric account of the way in which geography has shaped development in the Mexican states. The emphasis is placed on the way in which the natural geography is reinforced by political decisions, which configure the human geography of population density, urbanization and public good provision, which in turn determine income, growth and poverty. The paper presents brief historical instances of how geography has determined prospects for development at different moments in Mexican history. This anecdotal discussion seeks to highlight the intrinsic link of geography with political institutions, which is central to understanding the economic effects of geography. The paper then presents a descriptive statistical and geographical profile of the relationship between geography and development in Mexico. The paper argues that the main channel through which geography affects development is political. The fragmentation of political jurisdictions in the form of municipal governments constitutes a proxy for man-made barriers to geographic mobility, which explain the interaction between geography, politics and development.

Fiscal Decentralization in Mexico: The Bailout Problem

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the determinants and consequences of bailing out states, in particular, those observed in Mexico. This work suggests that the explicit generalized bailout carried out by the federal government in Mexico in 1995 created a moral hazard problem. Another result of the analysis is that the existing institutional-legal framework is not adequate, since it provides incentives for states to borrow and for banks to lend without evaluating the risk of the project. Likewise, the importance of the state is a major determinant in providing bailout transfers. Also, the more fiscal need a state government has when the state government is incapable of adjusting its expenditure, the more likely the state to get an extraordinary transfer during the period of study. On the other hand, political variables are not an important determinant of a bailout, except, perhaps, when there are state elections. It is also shown that excessive indebtedness of local states may have equity implications as well: bailouts tend to be highly regressive, as the poorer—and less indebted—states receive much less in extraordinary resources.

Industrial development under institutional frailty: the development of the Mexican textile industry in the nineteenth century

La Historia Económica en Latinoamérica. Edición a cargo de Pablo Martín Aceña, Adolfo Meisel, Carlos Newland.Editada en la Fundación Empresa PúblicaLa industria textil moderna apareció en México tempranamente y creció de forma continua a lo largo del siglo XIX. Sin embargo, esto no se tradujo en un proceso de industrialización exitoso como resultado de altos costos de transporte y fragilidad institucional: concepto que incluye la incertidumbre, la debilidad y la fragmentación institucionales. La fragilidad institucional generó una política arancelaría capturada que otorgaba bajos niveles de protección efectiva a la industria, un mercado financiero atrasado que limitó los recursos disponibles al crecimiento industrial, y un crecimiento en los costos de transporte debido a las alcabalas. Los altos costos de transporte fragmentaron el mercado nacional y como resultado generaron una industria geográficamente dispersa.Modern texture manufacture appeared early in México and grew continuously through the 19th century. Yet, it did not transíate into a successful industrialization process as a result of naturally endowed high transportation costs and institutional frailty: a concept that encompasses institutional uncertainty, weakness and fragmentation. Institutional frailty generated a captured tariff policy that gave low effective protection to the industry, a backward financial market that limited resources available for industrial growth, and increased transportation costs through inter-state tariff barriers. High transportation costs fragmented the national market and as a result, the textile industry grew geographically dispersed.Publicad

Rethinking Measures of Democracy and Welfare State Universalism: Lessons from Subnational Research

Democracy and the welfare state are two of the most extensively studied concepts and themes in the field of comparative politics. Debate about how to best measure the two concepts has failed to contemplate the extent to which political and social rights are uniformly present across distinct regions of the national territory, despite the presence of substantial subnational research that underscores wide variation inside countries. We argue that this omission hampers our understanding of the two phenomena and we propose a new measure of democracy and healthcare unversalism, which we call the Adjusted Measures of Democracy and Welfare Universalism. The new measures integrate territorial inequality into existing national-level indicators, providing a more accurate picture of country performance and opening the door to new, multi-level theory building

Building Support for Taxation in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Mexico

In spite of the importance of taxation for political and economic development, we know relatively little about the conditions under which citizens might not exact a political cost on leaders for adopting a particular tax. Drawing on insights from the literature on institutional design, this article examines how certain features of taxes – such as allowing for civil society oversight, sunset provisions that make the duration of taxes finite, and earmark mechanisms that direct tax revenue for a specific purpose – affect political support behind them. It also evaluates the role of three important aspects of the fiscal exchange, namely trust in government, perceptions of the public good, and level of income. Based on an original survey experiment focusing on the provision of public safety in Mexico, I find that these design features increase political support for taxation, especially among those with low trust in government, perceptions of high quality of the public good, and low income. These findings have important implications for Mexico, as well as a number of other countries that have both low levels of extraction and increased public spending imperatives

Crime and the Economy in Mexican States : Heterogeneous Panel Estimates (1993-2012)

This paper studies the transmission of crime shocks to the economy in a sample of 32 Mexican states over the period from 1993 to 2012. The paper uses a panel structural VAR approach which accounts for the heterogeneity of the dynamic state level responses in GDP, FDI and international migration flows, and measures the transmission via the impulse response of homicide rates. The approach also allows the study of the pattern of economic responses among states. In particular, the percentage of GDP devoted to new construction and the perception of public security are characteristics that are shown to be associated with the sign and magnitude of the responses of economic variables to crime shocks

Pablo de Céspedes entre Italia y España

Este trabajo examina los frescos que Pablo de Céspedes pintó durante el tercer cuarto del siglo xvi en la capilla Bonfili de la iglesia de Santa Trinidad de los Montes, en Roma. Son las únicas obras que se conservan de su primera estancia en Italia. El estudio muestra la manera como este humanista transformó algunos de los modelos que lo influyeron durante su juventud. Se utilizan también sus muy posteriores textos para esbozar su desarrollo pictórico, y se muestra la faceta práctica y teórica del artista, sus preocupaciones de juventud y de madurez, la influencia que su estancia en Italia ejerció sobre su obra y modo de pensar, así como sus propias contribuciones al medio artístico romano