Data for: Income inequality and violent crime: Evidence from Mexico's drug war

Abstract of associated article: The goal of this paper is to examine the effect of inequality on crime rates in a unique context, Mexico's drug war. The analysis exploits an original dataset containing inequality and crime statistics on more than 2000 Mexican municipalities over a 20-year period. To uncover the causal effect of inequality on crime, we use an instrumental variable for the Gini coefficient that combines the initial income distribution at the municipality level with national trends. Our estimates indicate that a one-point increment in the Gini coefficient between 2007 and 2010 translates into an increase of more that 36% in the number of drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The fact that the effect found during the drug war is substantially greater is likely caused by the rise in rents to be extracted through crime and an expansion in the employment opportunities in the illegal sector through the proliferation of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), accompanied by a decline in legal job opportunities and a reduction in the probability of being caught given the resource constraints faced by the law enforcement system. Combined, the latter factors made the expected benefits of criminal activity shift in a socially undesirable direction after 2007.Sector Board: Poverty (POV

Streamlining and Privatization Prices in the Telecommunications Industry

We study the link between state-owned restructuring before privatization and privatization sales prices for the telecommunications industry. We use new data to cover 84 telecommunications privatizations, which account for nearly 80% of the sector in terms of value. We focus on streamlining policies and regulatory issues prior to privatization and find that, while most labour streamlining measures have no bearing on privatization prices, the presence of a regulatory agency prior to privatization does impact on prices, especially if such an agency was set up well before the sale took place. Copyright (c) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2006.

The median is the message : a good enough measure of material wellbeing and shared development progress

Article first published online: 14 JUL 2015This is a revised version of CGD WP 2014/351.We argue that survey-based median household consumption expenditure (or income) per capita be incorporated into standard development indicators, as a simple, robust and durable indicator of typical individual material wellbeing in a country. Using household survey data available for low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's PovcalNet tool, we show that as a measure of income-related wellbeing, it is far superior to the commonly used GDP per capita as well as survey-based measures at the mean. We also argue that survey-based median measures are ‘distribution-aware’, i.e. when used as the denominator of various widely available indicators such as mean consumption expenditure per capita they provide a ‘good enough’ indicator of consumption (or income) inequality. Finally, as a post-2015 indicator of progress at the country-level in promoting shared development and reducing inequality, we propose that the rate of increase in median consumption per capita after taxes and transfers exceeds the rate of increase in average consumption in the same period

Income and beyond: multidimensional poverty in six Latin American countries

This paper studies multidimensional poverty for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay for the period 1992-2006. The approach overcomes the limitations of the two traditional methods of poverty analysis in Latin America (income-based and unmet basic needs) by combining income with five other dimensions: school attendance for children, education of the household head, sanitation, water and shelter. The results allow a fuller understanding of the evolution of poverty in the selected countries. Over the study period, El Salvador, Brazil, Mexico and Chile experienced significant reductions in multidimensional poverty. In contrast, in urban Uruguay there was a small reduction in multidimensional poverty, while in urban Argentina the estimates did not change significantly. El Salvador, Brazil and Mexico, and rural areas of Chile display significantly higher and more simultaneous deprivations than urban areas of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In all countries, deprivation in access to proper sanitation and education of the household head are the highest contributors to overall multidimensional poverty