We reexamine in this paper the role of globalization on top income shares (five classes from top 0.1% to top 10% of the income distribution) for a sample of 15 economies over the period 1970-2004. We build on previous works by investigating financial globalization measures that complement trade openness. Our system GMM (SGMM) estimations allow for a robust treatment of the endogeneity between income concentration and GDP per capita (as well as with taxation or government size). We find three interesting new results. First, the financial integration measure based on portfolio equity and FDI stocks (GEQ) turns out to have a large impact on top income shares, suggesting that the channel through which globalization affects income concentration is through FDI/equity flows. Second, we find strong support for the progressivity of taxation: there is an almost one to one negative effect of higher tax on top income (top 0.1%), which declines monotonically until the top 10% class. Finally, partitioning the sample into GEQ below and above (panel) averages, for relatively low levels of financial globalization increases in GEQ lead to positive effects on income of the extremely rich households. No such result is found for more financially integrated economies, with only an indirect impact through higher domestic taxation on capital and labor income.
This study contributes with original empirical evidence on the distributional and welfare effects of one of the most important health policies implemented by the Mexican government in the last decade, the Seguro Popular de Salud (SPS). We analyze the effect of SPS on households’ welfare using a decomposable index that considers insured and uninsured households’ response to out-of-pocket (OOP) payments using both social welfare weights and inequality aversion. The disaggregation of the welfare index allows us to explore the heterogeneity of the SPS impact on households’ welfare. We applied propensity score matching to reduce the self-selection bias of being SPS insured. Overall results suggest non-conclusive results of the impact of SPS on households’ welfare. When we disaggregated the welfare index by different sub-population groups, our results suggest that households’ beneficiaries of SPS with older adults or living in larger cities are better protected against OOP health care payments than their uninsured counterparts. However, no effect was found among SPS-insured households living in rural and smaller cities, which is a result that could be attributed to limited access to health resources in these regions. Scaling up health insurance coverage is a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure the protection of SPS coverage against financial risks among the poor.
Individuals opt for DAPPs when they look for health care: in a nearby provider, for either the most recent or common ailments, and in an urban setting; regardless of most socioeconomic background. The relevance of location and accessibility variables in our study provides evidence of the role taken by this provider in the Mexican health care system.
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