Rafael Garduño Rivera

• PhD. Applied Economics
• Profesor Titular (Associate Professor) at Universidad de Navarra

En este trabajo se caracteriza la competitividad económica de los municipios que integran el Bajío, destacando las actividades principales en cuanto a su aportación al producto interno bruto y su grado de integración o complementariedad. La unidad de análisis principal son los seis ejes carreteros que delimitan la concentración espacial de la activ...

La Nueva Geografía Económica (NGE) pregunta si el comercio conduce a una mayor concentración de la actividad económica. Sin embargo, pocos trabajos empíricos han evaluado los efectos regionales del comercio. Este artículo estudia la distribución regional de los beneficios del comercio en México después del Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del N...

This paper analyses women's economic participation (WEP) in Mexico. The hypothesis is that the regional disparities of women's participation are based on education, industrialization, urbanization and other non-observed factors. The question that this study addresses is: What regional factors influence women's participation and cause disparities in...

This paper studies the regional distribution of the benefits from trade in Mexico after NAFTA. Specifically, we ask whether or not NAFTA has increased the concentration of economic activity in Mexico. Unlike previous work which uses state-level data, we identify the effect of NAFTA on economic activity at the municipal level allowing us to observe...

The US is the most important export market for Mexican beer, generally accounting for over 80% of export sales. While the success of Mexican beer can be explained by a number of factors, geography is the backbone. It explains not only the cultural underpinnings of Mexican beer's success (e.g., immigration) but also other mechanisms and arrangements...

The decline of the real value of the minimum wage amid trade liberalization in Mexico has raised concerns about its policy effectiveness and unintended consequences. The literature has examined the impact of minimum wage adjustments on employment levels, worker earnings, poverty, and inequality. However, findings from different sample periods and r...

This paper conducts a comprehensive long-run analysis of the global spatial concentration and locational dynamics of manufacturing agglomerations in Mexico. While prior research on Mexico has examined the impact of trade liberalisation on processes of regional convergence or divergence, effects on the scale, location and dynamics of agglomerations...

This paper studies how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) affected the wage gap between high and low-paid workers within Mexico, considering internal migration. In low-skilled, labor-abundant developing countries, trade liberalization should theoretically increase the wages of low-skilled workers, decreasing income inequality. However,...

As worldwide food prices rise, there is a growing interest in understanding the effect of these increases on households. Building on previous work, while applying recent methodological advances, we focus our attention on México during the COVID-19 pandemic. We document these price escalations for a basket of foods representative of Mexican househol...

Trade liberalization and openness tend to increase regional inequalities, especially in developing economies, where infrastructure and institutions are not mature. Those trade-induced inequalities often deteriorate into horizontal inequality across demographic groups and result in the peripheralization of the disadvantaged. This study aims to asses...

Look at how Mexico's personnel (per capita) has evolved in the last 33 years!

For decades, there has been consensus that measures of well-being must move past easily available economic data, and newer measurements of well-being are often obtained through individual questions or questionnaires. Despite being easier to compare person to person, recent trends have shown that the former singular global evaluations are held back...

With the recent administration change in Mexico, the fluctuations in national energy policy have generated widespread concerns among investors and the public. The debate centers around Mexico's energy dependence on the US and how Mexico's energy development should move forward. The goal of this study is two-fold. We first review the history and bac...

Price shocks create and exacerbate poverty. Being able to promptly predict their effect, instead of waiting for households to fall into poverty, to try to assist them later, may greatly reduce the severity of the shock’s damage. However, understanding shock severity and targeting those households most likely to be disrupted requires a level of data...

This article addresses Mexico’s present situation in the lithium industry and its near future, ceteris paribus. Mexico’s short- and long-term lithium supply will not improve by the exploration and exploitation planned by the nationalistic objectives of the current government. This analysis demonstrates that significant changes must be made to Mexic...

To talk about Regional Economic Development in Mexico, we first need to understand Regional Economic Development (RED). RED is the search for a better standard of living for all people. However, RED explores a better standard of living for all the people in all regions and sectors of a nation. To reach this goal, there are several factors involved....

This article addresses the risks and uncertainties for Mexico derived from the excessive dependency on US natural gas. It will take as a reference Btu price fluctuation and the covenants contained on the based contract for sale and purchase of natural gas, particularly in the context of the behaviour displayed by market participants (including gove...

This paper investigates the causal relationship between competition and firm innovation and the impact of competition on firm productivity in the Mexican manufacturing sector. We use the analytical framework proposed by Aghion et al. (2005) and evaluate their central hypothesis. We use firm‐level data from the Mexican manufacturing Survey over the...

This commentary outlines the role of the economics approach in studying international borders and border regions. The discussion focuses on several key research areas related to international borders: international trade, border enforcement and immigration, border economy, border development and entrepreneurship, and border environment and geograph...

The synthetic control method is used to estimate the economic effects of signing free trade agreements (FTA) with the USA. This method allows building a counterfactual (which is the product per capita had the country not signed an FTA with the USA) as a weighted average of similar countries that did not sign an FTA with the USA. The graphical compa...

This article addresses Mexico’s present situation in the lithium industry and its near future, ceteris paribus. Mexico’s short- and long-term lithium supply will not improve by the exploration and exploitation planned by the nationalistic objectives of the current government. This analysis demonstrates that significant changes must be made to Mexic...

Abstract. This work evaluates the impact of productive specialization on the technical efficiency of the automotive industry in Mexico (1988-2008), using the production-possibility frontier method on a regional scale and considering its regional localization. To this end, an index of regional specialization in said sector was calculated, in additio...

Continental integration processes can alter traditional development axes. Paelinck and Polèse´s work in 1999 explains that in the case of Mexico there is a tension between the U.S. border and the rest of the country: Mexico´s integration in the NAFTA should have reduced the U.S. border attraction, extending the growth to territories located between...

Trade facilitates growth in some regions of a country while shrinking others, and therefore to benefit from trade, labour may need to be able to migrate. This mobility is particularly crucial in a developing country with high income inequality like Mexico. We seek to answer the following questions: What characteristics facilitate or hinder that int...

This paper estimates the impacts of road improvements on local employment and specialization in Mexico for 1986–2014, through changes in access to domestic markets and travel costs to ports and the U.S. border. Instrumenting for road placement endogeneity and addressing the recursion problem in regressions that involve access to markets, the analys...

Since Roback’s seminal work (J Polit Econ 90(6):1257–1278, 1982), theliterature on hedonic prices has evaluated the role of amenities in equilibrating regionaldifferentials in nominal wages and prices.While these studies generally find evidencefor traditional amenities and disamenities in developed countries, there remains little research on how ch...

en In this paper, we estimate the technical efficiency of Mexican states using stochastic production frontier models. The empirical section uses panel data over the period 1988–2008. A distinctive feature of the paper is the use of socioeconomic and location data in order to control for the heterogeneity of the states. We find that crime rate negat...

Background: Regional Economics and Economic Growth focus on the question of whether trade leads to a greater concentration of economic activity. Nevertheless, little empirical work has assessed the impact of trade on regional convergence. Therefore, this paper studies the regional convergence that has occurred in Mexico since NAFTA came into effect...

In this paper we estimate the technical efficiency of Mexican states using stochastic production frontier models. In particular, we are interested in studying the effect of crime on efficiency. The empirical section uses panel data over the period 1988-2008. A distinctive feature of the paper is the use of socioeconomic and location data in order t...

Since Roback (1982)’s seminal work, the literature has evaluated the role of the amenities to equilibrate the regional differentials of nominal wages and prices. While these studies generally find evidence for traditional amenities and disamenities in developed countries, it still exists a scarce exploration on how those characteristics assessed, l...

Regional Economics and Economic Growth focus on the question of whether trade leads to a greater concentration of economic activity. Yet little empirical work has assessed the regional convergence impacts of trade. Therefore this paper studies the regional convergence from trade in Mexico after NAFTA. Unlike previous papers, working with municipal-...

In this paper we estimate the technical efficiency of Mexican states using several stochastic production frontier models. The empirical section uses panel data over the period 1988-2008. A distinctive feature of the paper is to use socioeconomic and location data in order to control for the heterogeneity of the states. We find that inefficiency exp...

In the Maritime-Port Economic literature we have seen growing interest in the analysis of the process of inland distribution of maritime traffic. To extend the capacity of ports can be crucial for their competitiveness and increase their chances of success in the process of port choice. In this paper, we propose to analyze how the maritime traffic...

En este trabajo mostramos, desde una perspectiva económica, el comportamiento de la oferta de drogas ilícitas y la política para la lucha contra el narcotráfico en México durante el periodo del gobierno de Felipe Calderón, con el propósito de hacer una evaluación objetiva de la efectividad de la política contra las drogas en su gobierno. También, e...

En este documento se analiza cómo el fenómeno de las drogas ilícitas ha afectado diferentes aspectos de las economías regionales. En particular se analizan los efectos de las drogas sobre la población a nivel municipal, las unidades económicas y el valor agregado censal bruto. Posteriormente se realiza un análisis teniendo en cuenta cómo se han afe...

New Economic Geography (NEG) focuses on the question of whether trade leads to a greater concentration of economic activity. Little empirical work has been done on assessing the regional distribution of the impact of trade. Therefore, this paper looks at the regional distribution in Mexico of the benefits from trade after NAFTA. Unlike previous pap...

En los últimos 10 años han surgido en México diversos índices de competitividad que utilizan diferentes unidades de análisis, conceptos de competitividad y métodos de medición de la misma. Dentro de la literatura empírica que estudia el tema en el ámbito mexicano, existen dos aplicaciones principales a saber: a) ciudades, para las que existen los í...

This research uses, as theoretical framework, the social capital theory to analyze the different factors attracting migrants with high level of expertise to the state of Aguascalientes in Mexico. Aguascalientes is located in central Mexico; it has 11 municipalities, and is the second smallest state in the country with a territorial extension of 5,6...

We present an application of an estimation procedure based on entropy econometrics in order to infer data on wages for Mexican municipalities using aggregated information. Mexico is a specially useful case because official data are available with a high level of disaggregation. Specifically, their objective is to estimate wages paid by industry and...

This paper studies how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) affected income distribution within Mexico given internal migration. In low-skilled labor-abundant developing countries, trade liberalization should theoretically increase the income of low-skilled workers, decreasing income disparity. However, anecdotal evidence indicates that...

This dissertation consists of three empirical essays on the distributional effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on regional economic activity, migration and the distribution of wages in Mexico from 1980 to 2010. In the first essay, we use municipal level data from the Mexican Population and Economic censuses to explain the regi...

Éste artículo estudia el modelo Gain Sharing (pago derivado de la mejora en las actividades de los empleados). Los cuestionamientos que desarrolla esta investigación son: ¿Cómo es aplicado el Gain Sharing bajo las regulaciones mexicanas? ¿Cuáles son los beneficios obtenidos por las compañías y los empleados? ¿Qué aspectos deben considerarse para de...

This paper studies how internal migration responds to trade openness. We seek to answer the following questions: Has trade liberalization changed the pattern of internal-migration? What characteristics facilitate or hinder that internal migration? Using a gravity model of migration, We find that while economic growth from trade openness did draw wo...

This paper asks how NAFTA affected income distribution within Mexico considering changes in internal migration. Trade liberalization should theoretically increase the income of low-skilled workers in low-skilled labor-abundant developing countries. Thus, by increasing the wages of poorer workers, one might expect that trade will decrease income dis...