Apertura comercial, desigualdad y pobreza: Reseña de los enfoques metodológicos, el estado del conocimiento y la asignatura pendiente

Abstract

This paper surveys the recent literature on the methodologies that have been used to evaluate the distributive and poverty effects of trade liberalization in Latin America. Our survey classifies the large number of papers on the subject according to the welfare measure they use: inequality (on wages and household income) or poverty. Our survey shows that a sound methodological approach evaluating the welfare effects of trade liberalization should take into account: the degree of tariff to price transmission, all income sources (not only wages), employment effects, gender and regional heterogeneity of trade's impact, and second-order as well as general equilibrium effects. Two methodologies represent the latest efforts in this direction. (1) Income generation models with an explicit relationship between changes in tariff and changes in household real income (Porto, 2007), this methodology is capable of testing the different transmission channels linking trade policy and inequality and poverty. (2) The Macro-Micro approach (Bourguingon et al, 2008) which combines a CGE with a micro-simulation model evaluates the welfare effects of trade policy taking into account general equilibrium effects. These two approaches can be combined to get the short-and long-term welfare effects of trade policy, respectively.