Education and Earnings Inequality in Mexico

Abstract

Mexico's government should progressively shift more of the costs of higher education to its direct beneficiaries, facilitating the private absorption of those costs through student loan programs designed to correct market failures in the financial sector.

Education attainment levels increased dramatically for Mexico's labor force in the 1980s and early 1990s. In parallel, the country experienced a pronounced increase in earnings inequality from 1984-94, reflected in a higher dispersion of wages and an absolute decline in the real incomes of less educated, poorer Mexicans. This increased wage dispersion presents policymakers with a tradeoff between efficiency considerations (favoring increased spending on higher education) and equity considerations (favoring a more equal distribution of per student spending) in the allocation of fiscal resources to education.

Lachler concludes that the best way to deal with this equity-efficiency tradeoff is to encourage greater private participation in higher education. His main findings are that: ° The accumulation of human capital during 1984-94, as proxied by education attainment, was accompanied by a more equal distribution of education attainment levels over that period and, thus, exerted an equalizing effect on the distribution of incomes. The increased income inequality observed over that period appears to be caused by an increased rate of skill-based technological change, whose transmission to Mexico and other developing countries may have been facilitated by the increased openness of their economies. ° The greater dispersion of wages observed in Mexico during the past decade raised the rates of return on investing in higher education, reversing the traditional pattern where primary education exhibits the highest rates of return. ° The social rates of return across levels of schooling were more uniform in 1994 than in 1984, suggesting a more efficient assignment of education spending. At the same time, the distribution of spending on education became more egalitarian, as per student spending in higher education declined markedly compared with per student spending at the primary level. This surprising coincidence in the pattern of spending on education was only possible because Mexico started out with a very distorted resource allocation in education that was both highly inequitable and inefficient. As Mexico's policymakers are on the way to correcting these distortions, the opportunities for avoiding the equity-efficiency tradeoff within Mexico's centralized education framework will become progressively exhausted. ° There is little reason to expect the pace of technological change, which appears mainly responsible for raising wage dispersion and the relative returns on higher education, to abate. Efficiency considerations dictate that Mexico should respond by devoting more resources to higher education. However, the federal budget, which traditionally has financed the lion's share of higher education costs in Mexico, is unable to accommodate additional spending on higher education, while spending cuts elsewhere in the education sector are bound to raise serious equity questions. Thus, to avoid falling behind in terms of human capital accumulation, greater private sector participation is necessary, at least in terms of cost recovery from the main beneficiaries of higher education.

This paper - a product of the Mexico Country Department - emerged from research in the preparation of the 1998 Country Economic Memorandum and is part of the department's larger effort to engage in a fruitful economic policy dialogue with Mexican policymakers. The author may be contacted at [e-mail].