The political economy of inequality: An assessment of the evolution of earnings inequality in Mexico and the Americas, 1968--2000

While one of the most important social problems of the past century and this one just beginning continues to be the rise of inequality within and between countries, the development of consistent measurements of the change of inequality through time remains a significant obstacle to research in this area. This dissertation will develop an assessment of the evolution of inequality in Mexico and for Latin America, using new measurements of the evolution of earnings inequality, specifically but not exclusively in manufacturing. The relationship between the variation of earnings inequality and a series of policies implemented in the past thirty years for most of the countries in the region will be analyzed and movements of inequality will be related to patterns of industrial change.; With the measurement proposed, it is possible to assess the relationship of inequality with specific policies and economic strategies that Mexico and Latin American countries have implemented in the past thirty years. This period covers an important amount of economic and political change that literature studying this region has not yet appropriately related to the change in the wage and employment structures of inequality. This dissertation will help to fill that gap.; The literature testifies to the continuing difficulty in assessing inequality for the region of Latin America. The problem stems from the problematic data used to compute traditional measurements of inequality. Even though these summaries rely on household surveys of income or expenditure, the measurement is rendered incomparable across countries, mainly because of the use of different survey techniques and disparate time periods. Even though a sense of rising inequality is present in specific studies of some countries, current research has not produced dependable and replicable measurements of the frequency and dynamics of the inequality as the measurements proposed in this dissertation.; Is it possible to measure and assess the evolution of inequality consistently in Mexico and Latin America? The explicit answer to this question is the main research objective of this dissertation.