Determinación del salario y capital humano en México: 1987-1993

From 1987 to 1993 the Mexican economy experienced deep economic reforms that have liberalized foreign trade and economic activities. These measures, known as structural adjustment and characterized as neoliberal in nature, should have fostered a vigorous recovery of growth and improvement in social conditions. The results have not been as expected; in particular, and according to the theory of international trade, it might be argued that the distribution of income would improve as wage differences decreased as an effect from the correction of the bias that improperly intensifies the use of capital under the strategy of import substitution. A number of works have reported that the liberalization or structural adjustment has been accompanied by greater wage dispersion, such as in Mexico and Chile; while for Korea, Singapore and Taiwan the differentials between educated and uneducated laborers reduced; and even in some other cases both tendencies have been registered, as in Colombia and Costa Rica. In the present work, we present evidence based upon data from the National Survey on Urban Employment, in which an increasing wage dispersion is indicated, and it is noticed, by means of simple econometric exercises, that the approach of human capital is a useful analytical framework, however limited, to explain the determination of incomes from work along the period from 1987 to 1993.