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on Central and South America |
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Issue of 2007‒04‒21
ten papers chosen by |
| By: | Christian R. Jaramillo H.; Jorge Tovar |
| Abstract: | Este trabajo se centra en estimar el impacto que el impuesto al valor agregado (IVA) tiene sobre los precios al consumidor en Colombia. La estrategia de estimación aprovecha la frecuencia de las reformas tributarias, que generan abundante variación en las series de tiempo de tasas de impuestos. La identificación de los efectos del IVA sobre los precios se realiza utilizando series del índice de precios al consumidor (IPC) calculadas por el Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE), la agencia oficial colombiana de estadísticas. Las estimaciones indican que en Colombia la incidencia del IVA sobre el precio de la canasta o pass-through es, a nivel nacional, estadísticamente igual a uno. El estudio también encuentra que la incidencia promedio es menor cuando se toman bienes individuales, sin ponderar por su importancia en la canasta de consumo, y controlando por la posibilidad que los mismos productos tengan características no observables distintas para cada ciudad. Este resultado resalta la heterogeneidad en la incidencia del impuesto a través de los mercados. |
| Date: | 2007–03–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:001049:002904&r=lam |
| By: | FEDESARROLLO |
| Abstract: | El TLC con Estados Unidos cambiará la economía colombiana. En este momento, el Congreso de los dos países debe analizarlo y aprobarlo. La presente edición de ECONOMÍA Y POLÍTICA analiza la economía política del tratado en el Congreso, y muestra como el debate entre simpatizantes y opositores del TLC en los dos paises se basa en el intercambio entre crecimiento y distribución. ECONOMÍA Y POLÍTICA muestra como los requerimientos de los opositores para aprobar el tratado en los dos países parecen estar alineados en algunos aspectos, y argumenta que si los requerimientos de los demócratas buscan proteger a potenciales perdedores del tratado en Colombia, estos requerimientos deben ser atendidos. |
| Date: | 2007–02–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:001068:002906&r=lam |
| By: | José Ignacio Sémbler; Patricio Meller; Joaquín Vial |
| Abstract: | En este trabajo se especifica y estima un modelo econométrico para el consumo de celulosa a nivel mundial y desagregado según los principales países consumidores. El modelo utilizado corresponde a uno de demanda derivada para una firma productora de papel representativa que demandará celulosa como un insumo más para su producción. Esta demanda es posteriormente agregada a nivel de país para la estimación econométrica. Las elasticidades del consumo mundial son obtenidas mediante simulaciones del modelo agregado. Luego se estudia la capacidad del modelo para replicar los datos históricos, su respuesta ante shocks transitorios sobre ciertas variables relevantes y su comportamiento fuera del período de estimación. Los resultados obtenidos son acordes con la evidencia empírica existente. La elasticidad precio del consumo a nivel mundial tiene un valor -0,20 en el corto plazo (CP) y -0,24 en el largo plazo (LP). El ingreso de los países resultó ser una de las variables que tiene gran influencia en el consumo de celulosa; la elasticidad ingreso encontrada fue 1,02 y 1,12 para el CP y LP respectivamente. En este estudio se incorporó también el efecto del precio del papel reciclado, obteniéndose una elasticidad precio cruzada de 0,22 en el CP y de 0,24 en el LP, lo que pone de manifiesto la sustitución entre estos productos. Para el precio de la energía se obtuvo una elasticidad de -0,01 tanto en el CP como en el LP. El hecho que no se registraran diferencias significativas entre las elasticidades de corto y largo plazo indicaría según el modelo planteado, que el consumo de celulosa no sufre mayores ajustes entre lo que es consumo corriente y el de largo plazo o de equilibrio. Los resultados indican además que si bien es innegable la importancia creciente en el consumo mundial de celulosa que han tenido países en vías de desarrollo como China, actualmente son los países industrializados los que tienen una mayor incidencia en el consumo mundial; luego, escenarios futuros para el consumo de este producto, al menos en el corto plazo, debiesen estar ligados con el comportamiento de estos países. El estudio muestra además que el modelo agregado es capaz de replicar satisfactoriamente los datos históricos dentro de la muestra, así como también los datos fuera de la muestra. Finalmente una proyección a mediando plazo para el período 2003-2008 predice que el consumo de este producto debiese crecer a una tasa promedio anual del 2,3%, cifra acorde con las proyecciones que maneja la industria. |
| Date: | 2006 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:edj:ceauch:227&r=lam |
| By: | Bjerg, Christina (Department of Economics, Aarhus School of Business); Bjørnskov, Christian (Department of Economics, Aarhus School of Business); Holm, Anne (Department of Economics, Aarhus School of Business) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we explore the potential growth effects of foreign aid when in conjunction with severe debt problems. We first argue that aid, when used to finance debt repayments, does not lead to Dutch Disease while still alleviating an economic problem. A set of empirical estimates show that while inflows of foreign aid in general are not associated with growth in a sample of 38 Least Developed Countries, an interaction term with the level of external debt is significant. We take this as suggestive evidence of an alleviating effect of aid in these countries and offer some tentative thoughts on the implications for future aid policies |
| Keywords: | Economic growth; foreign aid; external debt |
| JEL: | F34 F35 O40 |
| Date: | 2007–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:aareco:2007_001&r=lam |
| By: | Hugo Ñopo (Inter-American Development Bank and IZA) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the evolution of the gender wage gap in Chile during the period 1992 to 2003 using the decomposition approach developed in Ñopo (2004). This approach, which decomposes the wage gap into four additive elements, stresses the need for comparisons inside the common support for the distributions of observable characteristics of individuals. Also, it allows an analysis of the distribution of unexplained differences in wages (not only the averages). The results suggest that, besides the high educational attainment of females, there are noticeable gender wage gaps in Chile favoring males. These unexplained differences in wages, which move around 25 percent of average female wages, show no clear tendency during the period of analysis. The wage gaps are higher at the highest percentiles of the wage distribution, among those with higher educational attainment, among directors and among part-time workers. The technique also detects some evidence of a glass-ceiling effect in Chilean labor markets, such that for some occupations and particular combinations of observable characteristics, there are highly paid males but not females. |
| Keywords: | matching, non-parametric, gender wage gap, Latin America |
| JEL: | C14 D31 J16 O54 |
| Date: | 2007–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2698&r=lam |
| By: | Sebastián Calónico (Inter-American Development Bank); Hugo Ñopo (Inter-American Development Bank and IZA) |
| Abstract: | The private provision of educational services has been representing an increasing fraction of the Peruvian schooling system, especially in recent last decades. While there have been many claims about the differences in quality between private and public schools, there is no complete assessment of the different impacts of these two type of providers on the labor markets. This paper is an attempt to provide such a comprehensive overview. We explore private-public differences in the individual returns to education in Urban Peru. Exploiting a rich pair of data sets (ENNIV 1997 and 2000) that include questions on type of education (public vs. private) for each educational level (primary, secondary, technical tertiary and university tertiary) to a representative sample of adults we are able to measure the differences in labor earnings for all possible educational trajectories. The results indicate higher returns to education for those who attended private schools than those who attended the public system. Nonetheless, these higher returns also show higher dispersion, reflecting wider quality heterogeneity within the private system. The private-public differences in returns are more pronounced at the secondary than at any other educational level. On the other hand, the private-public differences in returns from technical education are almost nonexistent. A cohort approach paired with a rolling-windows technique allows us to capture generational evolutions of the private-public differences. The results indicate that these differences have been increasing during the last two decades. |
| Keywords: | returns to schooling, wages |
| JEL: | J31 I2 |
| Date: | 2007–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2711&r=lam |
| By: | Jennifer Hunt |
| Abstract: | In this paper, I examine the role of household income in determining who bribes and how much they bribe in health care in Peru and Uganda. I find that rich patients are more likely than other patients to bribe in public health care: doubling household consumption increases the bribery probability by 0.2-0.4 percentage points in Peru, compared to a bribery rate of 0.8%; doubling household expenditure in Uganda increases the bribery probability by 1.2 percentage points compared to a bribery rate of 17%. The income elasticity of the bribe amount cannot be precisely estimated in Peru, but is about 0.37 in Uganda. Bribes in the Ugandan public sector appear to be fees-for-service extorted from the richer patients amongst those exempted by government policy from paying the official fees. Bribes in the private sector appear to be flat-rate fees paid by patients who do not pay official fees. I do not find evidence that the public health care sector in either Peru or Uganda is able to price-discriminate less effectively than public institutions with less competition from the private sector. |
| JEL: | H4 K4 O1 |
| Date: | 2007–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13034&r=lam |
| By: | Leon, Joana Severo; Borges, Vicente Cassepp; Koller, Silvia; Cunningham, Wendy; Dell ' Aglio, Debora |
| Abstract: | This study constructs three indices to measure how well Brazil ' s young people are surviving their transition to adulthood. Youth development is difficult to quantify because of the multi-dimensionality of youth b ehavior. Most monitoring use individual indicators in specific sectors, making it difficult to track overall progress. The study adapts to the Brazilian case a methodology developed by Duke University to measure the well-being of U.S. children and youth. It uses readily available data to construct three indices for each Brazilian state based on 36 indicators encompassing the health, behavior, school performance, institutional connectedness, and socioeconomic conditions. The indices conclude that young people in the states of Santa Catarina and the Federal District are doing particularly well and those in Alagoas and Pernambuco are the worst off. While these rankings are expected to continue into the next generation, young people in other states have a brighter (Espiritu Santo) or more dismal (Rio Grande de Sul, Tocatins) future due to underinvestment in today ' s children. Still others (Rio de Janeiro) are underutilizing their resources so their young citizens are in a worse situation than they could be if the state were to invest more. The hope is that the methodology can be used in Brazil as it has been used in the United States to estimate the indices annually, thus allowing policymakers, young people, and society to track the well-being of youth in each state over time. |
| Keywords: | Health Monitoring & Evaluation,Adolescent Health,Youth and Governance,Population Policies,Children and Youth |
| Date: | 2007–04–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4189&r=lam |
| By: | Rafael Di Tella; Sebastian Galiani; Ernesto Schargrodsky |
| Abstract: | The study of how crime affects different income groups faces several difficulties. The first is that crime-avoiding activities vary across income groups. Thus, a lower victimization rate in one group may not reflect a lower burden of crime, but rather a higher investment in avoiding crime. A second difficulty is that, typically, only a small fraction of the population is victimized so that empirical tests often lack the statistical power to detect differences across groups. We take advantage of a dramatic increase in crime rates in Argentina during the late 1990s to document several interesting patterns. First, the increase in victimization experienced by the poor is larger than the increase endured by the rich. The difference appears large: low-income people have experienced increases in victimization rates that are almost 50 percent higher than those suffered by high-income people. Second, for home robberies, where the rich can protect themselves (by hiring private security, for example), we find significantly larger increases in victimization rates amongst the poor. In contrast, for robberies on the street, where the rich can only mimic the poor, we find similar increases in victimization for both income groups. Third, we document direct evidence on pecuniary and non-pecuniary protection activities by both the rich and poor, ranging from the avoidance of dark places to the hiring of private security. Fourth, we show the correlations between changes in protection and mimicking and changes in crime victimization. Fifth, we offer one possible way of using these estimates to explain the incidence of crime across income groups. |
| Keywords: | Victimization, income distribution, private security, victim adaptation |
| JEL: | K42 |
| Date: | 2006–11–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wdi:papers:2006-849&r=lam |
| By: | Evangelos M. Falaris (Department of Economics,University of Delaware) |
| Abstract: | Misclassification of the dependent variable in binary choice models can result in inconsistency of the parameter estimates. I estimate probit models that treat misclassification probabilities as estimable parameters for three labor market outcomes: formal sector employment, pension contribution and job change. I use Living Standards Measurement Study data from Nicaragua, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, and Panama. I find that there is significant misclassification in eleven of the sixteen cases that I investigate. If misclassification is present, but is ignored, estimates of the probit parameters and their standard errors are biased toward zero. In most cases, predicted probabilities of the outcomes are significantly affected by misclassification of the dependent variable. Even a moderate degree of misclassification can have substantial effects on the estimated parameters and on many of the predictions. |
| Keywords: | Data Quality; Misclassification; Formal Sector; Pension Contributor; Job Change; Nicaragua; Peru; Brazil; Guatemala; Panama |
| JEL: | C81 C25 O17 J26 J62 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dlw:wpaper:07-05.&r=lam |