Stratification economics in the land of persistent inequalities

Abstract

Stratification economics has emerged as a field that puts historically and institutionally determined intergroup hierarchies at the forefront of distributive analysis. However, most of the existing theoretical and empirical literature has focused on studying the US stratification regime, limiting the potential application of this analytical framework to other geographies. This paper applies the theoretical framework of stratification economics to analyze the Mexican distributive regime. In the process, we show that expanding the regional focus of stratification economics requires incorporating several insights from other traditions of stratification analysis. Furthermore, we show that a stratification economics approach overcomes several pitfalls of more traditional approaches to analyzing the Mexican distributive regime, such as the human capital approach that anchored several public policy interventions deployed at the beginning of the XXIst century.