Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur

This paper proposes a new Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America. The index combines monetary and non‐monetary indicators, updates deprivation cut‐offs for certain traditional unsatisfied basic needs indicators and includes some new indicators, aiming to maximize regional comparability within the data constraints. The index is estimated for 17 countries of the region at two points in time—one around 2005 and the other around 2012. Overall, we estimate about 28 percent of people are multidimensionally poor in 2012 in the region. We find statistically significant reductions of poverty in most countries, both in terms of incidence and intensity over the period under analysis. However, important disparities between rural and urban areas remain. Statistical scrutiny of the index suggests that it captures the state of poverty relatively well while maintaining a certain parsimony and being highly robust to changes in weights, indicators, and poverty cut‐off.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to organize and present the literature related to firm’s capital structure across the years and find the most relevant publications and authors in the research area. Moreover, the authors pretend to fill the gap in the literature by studying different works and their compatibility with the main theories. Design/methodology/approach The systematic literature review is conducted by using the Scopus database. The methodology applied is through a concise searching considering keywords, the most cited papers, the latest publications and theories that explain small and medium enterprises (SMEs) capital structure. Findings Some key aspects about the capital structure of firms and SMEs are identified, such as documents per year, type of publications, the most used languages, the top journals, the most cited papers, the most productive and influential authors and the latest published papers. Research limitations/implications The information presented is only informative from the Scopus database. Hence, this work only gives a general orientation of the most relevant research and its tendency of this database. More exhaustive works could be done using different keywords and analyzing other firms’ characteristics. Practical implications This kind of study is effective in evaluating the scientific production and to find the most important contributions of the subject. Furthermore, this information is useful for researchers’ studies on SME capital structure to underline the research direction and to be acquainted with the literature tendency. Originality/value There are not similar works that delve into the literature respect to SME capital structure and compare the main theories in relation to empirical works. Therefore, a synthesized evolution of previous works related to the capital structure of firms and SMEs is presented.

La masificación de los sistemas educativos latinoamericanos lleva a reconsiderar el concepto de inclusión/exclusión educativa ya que, en parte, las desventajas sociales se han trasladado al interior de la escuela, configurando situaciones de inclusión desigual. Considerando tres dimensiones principales de la inclusión educativa – acceso, aprendizajes e integración/segregación – este trabajo se centra en la última, por ser la menos estudiada en la región. El objetivo es analizar empíricamente la situación actual, la dinámica y la evolución de la segregación por nivel socioeconómico durante las últimas décadas para el nivel secundario. Se emplean para ello datos de las rondas 2000-2015 del Programa para la Evaluación Internacional de Alumnos(PISA) correspondientes a nueve países de América Latina. Se estiman diversos índices sintéticos para cuantificar y caracterizar el problema, comparando a la región con otras, así como a los países latinoamericanos entre sí. Los resultados posicionan a la región como la de menor integración social escolar, pese a cierta reducción de la segregación en algunos países durante los últimos años. Dada la intensidad del problema y su potencial impacto en la desigualdad de oportunidades, la meta ulterior del trabajo es contribuir a visibilizar el tema y aportar información para el diseño de políticas.

Discrimination of and memory for others' generous and selfish behaviors could be adaptive abilities in social animals. Dogs have seemingly expressed such skills in both direct and indirect interactions with humans. However, recent studies suggest that their capacity may rely on cues other than people's individual characteristics, such as the place where the person stands. Thus, the conditions under which dogs recognize individual humans when solving cooperative tasks still remains unclear. With the aim of contributing to this problem, we made dogs interact with two human experimenters, one generous (pointed towards the food, gave ostensive cues, and allowed the dog to eat it) and the other selfish (pointed towards the food, but ate it before the dog could have it). Then subjects could choose between them (studies 1-3). In study 1, dogs took several training trials to learn the discrimination between the generous and the selfish experimenters when both were of the same gender. In study 2, the discrimination was learned faster when the experimenters were of different gender as evidenced both by dogs' latencies to approach the bowl in training trials as well as by their choices in preference tests. Nevertheless, dogs did not get confused by gender when the experimenters were changed in between the training and the choice phase in study 3. We conclude that dogs spontaneously used human gender as a cue to discriminate between more and less cooperative experimenters. They also relied on some other personal feature which let them avoid being confused by gender when demonstrators were changed. We discuss these results in terms of dogs' ability to recognize individuals and the potential advantage of this skill for their lives in human environments.

Waylen, K. A., J. Martin-Ortega, K. L. Blackstock, I. Brown, B. E. Avendaño Uribe, S. Basurto Hernández, M. B. Bertoni, M. L. Bustos, A. X. Cruz Bayer, R. I. Escalante Semerena, M. A. Farah Quijano, F. Ferrelli, G. L. Fidalgo, I. Hernández López, M. A. Huamantinco Cisneros, S. London, D. L. Maya Vélez, P. N. Ocampo-Díaz, C. E. Ortiz Guerrero, J. C. Pascale, G. M. E. Perillo, M. C. Piccolo, L. N. Pinzón Martínez, M. L. Rojas, F. Scordo, V. Vitale, and M. Zilio. 2015. Can scenario-planning support community-based natural resource management? Experiences from three countries in Latin America. Ecology and Society 20(4):28.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-07926-200428

En este artículo se analiza el impacto de la segregación estudiantil por nivel socioeconómico sobre la equidad educativa en la escuela secundaria argentina. La presencia de segregación implica que los alumnos se distribuyen de forma desigual en el sistema, tendiendo a concentrarse en ciertos establecimientos según su origen social. El objetivo es evaluar si este proceso contribuye a incrementar la desigualdad de logros educativos. Empleando la base de datos de PISA 2009, se estiman modelos multinivel para examinar el efecto de la composición social estudiantil de las escuelas en el desempeño individual en las pruebas de Lectura. La evidencia apoya la existencia de efectos composicionales significativos que contribuyen a explicar la dispersión en los resultados. Esto indica que los jóvenes de bajo estatus socioeconómico enfrentan un doble riesgo educativo: a la desventaja inicial relacionada con su contexto social y familiar desfavorable se suma la probable asistencia a centros con una población estudiantil más vulnerable y la exposición a efectos de pares negativos. Los hallazgos permiten sostener la importancia de considerar a la composición social de las escuelas como una variable clave de política educativa, y señalan la necesidad de analizar medidas orientadas a fomentar la integración social en el sistema.

Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) studies how institutions (the rules of the game of a society) determine the performance of a social-economic system. Elinor Ostrom extends the institutional analysis to the collective action for a particular case, the study of the social-ecological systems (SESs) (Ostrom 1990). Any group that attempts to manage a common resource (e.g. aquifers, pastures) for optimal sustainable production must solve a set of problems in order to create institutions to facilitate collective action. Some evidences show that following a set of design principles in creating institutions can lead to overcome these problems. The aim of the paper is to apply the SES framework to an artisanal fishery community in Argentina in order to: 1) describe the principal features, key variables and relations of the small-scale fishery system; 2) detect the principal drivers of a potential common-management and the leading detractors from the current communal performance; and 3) analyze the possibility that a self-governing for sustainable fishery may appear. Several drivers for potential common-management and some detractors from the current common performance are summarized. Artisanal fishery SES is currently at a bifurcation point. A common historical and cultural root, the presence of leaderships, the relevance of local knowledge, the dependence on the resource to sustainable livelihoods and the threat of big-scale fisheries area have generated incentives to collectiveaction. But, simultaneously, internal conflicts are the most important barrier for an integrated community-based management. The heterogeneity among actors and the relevant external conditions have resulted in two groups diverging in their self-organization. The work is framed by the project COMET-LA (COmmunitybased Management of Environmental challenges in Latin America; European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme of Research and Development), which aims to identify sustainable community-based governance for the management of natural resources that can be used in different social-ecological systems in a context of climate change and increasing competition in the use of resources.

La Curva de Kuznets Ambiental (CKA) ha sido probablemente el tópico más analizado en la economía ambiental en los últimos años. Puntualmente, la hipótesis sostiene que entre el producto y cualquier medida de contaminación plausible de ser utilizada como indicador de degradación ambiental se verifica en el largo plazo una relación funcional con forma de U invertida, por lo que el daño ambiental es una función creciente del nivel de actividad económica hasta un determinado nivel crítico de renta a partir del cual mayores niveles de renta se asocian a niveles progresivamente mayores de calidad ambiental. Sin embargo, varios de los argumentos que sirven de sustento teórico a la hipótesis no resultan mayormente operativos en las circunstancias económicas, sociales e institucionales propias de países en desarrollo. En particular, la desigualdad en la distribución del ingreso y la fragilidad del marco institucional en materia ambiental debilitan los principales fundamentos que sostienen esta hipótesis, quitando relevancia a la conveniencia de esperar y crecer para alcanzar mejoras en la calidad ambiental. En este contexto, el objetivo de este trabajo es revisar los argumentos teóricos que sirven de soporte a la CKA y analizar las particularidades que los mismos enfrentan en el caso de países en desarrollo, dejando en evidencia la importancia que la política ambiental adquiere en estos últimos para mejorar las condiciones de vida de la población. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) has probably been the most discussed topic in applied environmental economics over the last twenty years. The hypothesis states the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation, which involves that environmental damage increases with economic activity up to a certain level of income, after which increases in income are associated to higher environmental quality. However, many of the arguments that serve as a theoretical basis for the hypothesis are not applicable to the economic, social and institutional circumstances of developing countries. In particular, inequality in income distribution and the weakness of the institutional framework in the environmental field weakens the main arguments that support the idea of the EKC, making the desirability of waiting and growing to achieve improvements in environmental quality less relevant. In this context, the aim of this study is to present a review of the theoretical arguments supporting EKC and to analyze the particularities they face in the case of developing countries, showing the importance of the role played by environmental policy in the improvement of living conditions in these countries.

Coastal areas experience multiple pressures from anthropogenic activities that negatively change the ecological and environmental status of beaches and impact human welfare. The focus of this paper is coastal erosion, an issue that is very relevant for Argentina, the second largest nation in Latin America with an extensive coastline of nearly 5000 km. Coastal erosion decreases the attractiveness of coastal areas for tourism development, leading to considerable economic impacts. In this paper, two complementary approaches, the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) and the Systems Approach Framework (SAF), were used to analyse two beach resorts in Argentina: Monte Hermoso and Pehuen Co. Application of the SAF included stakeholder mapping, governance (institutional) mapping and issue identification. During the participatory meetings with stakeholders and decision makers, the problem of coastal erosion was identified as the most important in the region. The joint approach of DPSIR and SAF contributed to: (i) the determination and description of the economic drivers of coastal erosion; (ii) the identification of the associated activities and pressures; (iii) the assessment of the ecological and environmental state of coastal areas; (iv) the assessment of impacts of environmental changes on human wellbeing; and finally (v) a proposal of the possible management responses for mitigating the coastal erosion problem and the sustainable development of the region to the responsible authorities.

La inclusión financiera definida como el nivel de acceso y uso de servicios financieros constituye un tema incipiente en la literatura y de gran importancia para el desarrollo de sistemas económicos estables e inclusivos. El presente estudio propone analizar la forma en que se agrupan un conjunto de países de América Latina y Europa en cuanto a sus niveles de inclusión financiera y la trayectoria de estos grupos en los años 2011, 2014 y 2017, utilizando los datos de la base Global Findex. El método de análisis es de clúster jerárquicos. Se observa la persistencia de dos grandes conglomerados de países, de alta y baja inclusión financiera, y algunos grupos más dinámicos, con niveles intermedios de acceso y uso de servicios financieros. Mientras que el grupo de alta inclusión financiera, integrado por la mayoría de los países de Europa, se ha mostrado más homogéneo a través de los años, la agrupación de los países de América Latina ha sido más dinámica. Aquellos países que han implementado políticas públicas integradas, en cuanto a la promoción y financiación de la inclusión financiera, se han destacado por una mejor trayectoria en estos años.

Coastal ecosystems are one of the most impacted and altered regions worldwide, both because of natural reasons and because of the large population that is concentrated along the coasts. In Argentina, the problem of coastal erosion is very important as these areas represent the 18.33% of the whole territory with 36% of population living in this area. The objective of the present article is to characterize the main problems related to the use of resources and coastal management, leading to coastal erosion, from the perceptions of stakeholders and decision makers in the coastal zone of Pehuén Co and Monte Hermoso, Argentina. The fieldwork was performed by participative methodologies, while the results were analyzed under the institutional and social capital theoretical framework. One of the main results of the paper is that the lack of a strong social capital in the region and the existence of formal monitoring and sanctioning procedures developed by distant governmental institutions have increased the overexploitation of coast and beaches. Notwithstanding, the current and future relevance of coastal erosion for the region will demand the elaboration of bottom-up policies to reduce the vulnerability of the region and the performance of the adaptation policies.

Abstract This study assesses whether the trade-off or the pecking order theories explain the increased cash ratios in Latin American firms. It also assesses the explanatory power of additional variables that identify key macroeconomic features in Latin American economies. Due to its noticeable increase, cash became a key feature of Latin American firm performance over the last decades. The need for a better understanding is stressed by the fact that, during most of the last decade, these firms experienced a phase of accelerated economic growth and buoyant financial markets. The resulting surge in real investment opportunities within this period makes the growing cash holdings all the more puzzling. As far as we know, no other research addresses this issue in a direct way. There are robust facts about the increased cash holdings in Latin American firms. This article assesses traditional explanations and defines which fits more properly to the study sample. A complementary explanation regarding exchange rate exposure and key macroeconomic variables is constructed and empirically evaluated. To address potential sources of endogeneity, dynamic panel data methods are used. Particularly, the system generalized method of moments (GMM) was applied, as proposed by Blundell and Bond (1998). This article reports an increasing trend for corporate cash holdings in a sample of selected Latin American firms between 2000 and 2014. Likewise, net leverage and short-term debt show a declining trend over the same period. The trade-off theory may explain this. A substantial effect of macroeconomic variables particularly affecting firms that operate in the region is observed, such as exchange rate risks.

Este artículo analiza las disparidades territoriales desde el punto de vista de la pobreza entre el Norte Grande Argentino (NGA), históricamente más rezagado, y las restantes regiones del país en el periodo de 2003 a 2016. A partir de datos de la Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (EPH), se estima el índice de pobreza multidimensional (IPM) basado en el método de Alkire-Foster, en atención a las dimensiones de vivienda, servicios básicos, educación, empleo y seguridad social, e ingresos. Se encuentra que hubo una disminución de la pobreza en todas las regiones y, entre 2011 y 2016, una significativa reducción de las asimetrías regionales, que, aunque alentadora, debe relativizarse por distintas razones.

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of the 2008 financial crisis on informational efficiency by carrying out a long-memory analysis of European corporate bond markets. We compute the Hurst exponent for fifteen sectorial indices to scrutinise the time-varying behaviour of long-range memory, applying a shuffling technique to avoid short-term correlation. We find that the financial crisis has uneven effects on the informational efficiency of all corporate bond sectors, especially those related to financial services. However, their vulnerability is not homogeneous and some non-financial sectors suffer only a transitory effect. I

The relationship between female labour force participation (FLFP) and economic development is far more complex than it is often described in academic literature. Most studies have relied on income as the only proxy for development. In this paper, we re-examine this relationship from a multidimensional perspective.A principal component analysis method was used in order to cluster the information contained in multiple development indicators. The analysed data include the following dimensions: access to basic services, environment, inequality, poverty, education, economic structure, health, income and FLFP.The results provide evidence about the existence of a U-shaped relationship between development and FLFP. Least and most developed countries have the highest levels of FLFP and, conversely, countries with intermediate levels of development have the lowest. We observed that MENA and South Asian countries present a lower FLFP in relation to what is expected for their level of development. Our estimates suggest that FLFP is also affected by social, cultural and legal norms. Thus, greater freedom to travel or work as well as the existence of laws that criminalize workplace harassment promote FLFP. This suggests that differences in FLFP are explained by economics and non-economic factors and policy makers should explicitly consider this multidimensionality.

<abstract> <p>The benefits of financial inclusion could be particularly important in Latin America, where the levels of ownership and use of different instruments lag behind those of developed countries. An improvement in the ownership and use of formal financial instruments could result in a reduction in informality, the promotion of formal savings and productive credit, and, therefore, an inclusive economic growth. The objective of this paper is to analyze the financial inclusion of a group of Latin American countries in order to detect the most used financial instruments and the main socioeconomic determinants that explain their ownership or use. At the same time, the evolution of the main variables was also studied for the years 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2021. Micro-data from the Global Findex database was examined (except for 2021, in which only macro-data are available). Statistical models and multivariate econometrics are applied to understand the individual socioeconomic characteristics of people who are still very unlikely to own and use formal financial instruments. Finally, the main reasons for not having an account were analyzed in order to delve into the main restrictions on which the financial market must focus to achieve greater financial inclusion.</p> </abstract>

El objetivo del presente trabajo es analizar la inclusión financiera en siete países de América Latina. En específico, se pretende detectar los instrumentos financieros más utilizados y los principales determinantes que afectan su uso. Para ello, se examinan los microdatos de la base Global Findex del año 2017 y se aplican modelos econométricos multivariantes. Los resultados confirman que el instrumento más usado por los individuos son las cuentas financieras en instituciones formales, especialmente en Brasil y Chile, seguido por el uso de las tarjetas de crédito en Uruguay y Venezuela. Entre las características socioeconómicas de los individuos, se encuentra que aquellas personas de género masculino, de mayor edad, con educación terciaria y mayores niveles de ingresos son quienes muestran mayores probabilidades de estar incluidos financieramente.

Resumen. Entre las diversas expresiones de la inequidad social en la actualidad, se destaca la segmentación del sistema educativo, concepto que remite tanto a la presencia de circuitos escolares de distinta calidad como a la homogeneidad en la composición socioeconómica del público al que atienden. A través del presente artículo se pretende contribuir a la comprensión de este fenómeno en el contexto argentino. Luego de una breve exposición acerca del concepto, el panorama actual y las implicancias de la segmentación educativa en el país, se abordan las causas y la dinámica de la misma desde una doble perspectiva: 1) macro-social, para conocer las tendencias globales e históricas que actúan de marco para el sector educativo influyendo en su configuración actual, y 2) micro-social, porque resulta pertinente realizar un análisis institucional para identificar las pautas de comportamiento de los distintos agentes del sistema que, en su accionar cotidiano, puedan atentar contra su democratización.

The role of credit rating agencies has been under severe scrutiny after the subprime crisis. In this paper we explore the relationship between credit ratings and informational efficiency of a sample of thirty nine corporate bonds of US oil and energy companies from April 2008 to November 2012. For this purpose we use a powerful statistical tool, relatively new in the financial literature: the complexity–entropy causality plane. This representation space allows us to graphically classify the different bonds according to their degree of informational efficiency. We find that this classification agrees with the credit ratings assigned by Moody's. In particular, we detect the formation of two clusters, which correspond to the global categories of investment and speculative grades. Regarding the latter cluster, two subgroups reflect distinct levels of efficiency. Additionally, we also find an intriguing absence of correlation between informational efficiency and firm characteristics. This allows us to conclude that the proposed permutation-information-theory approach provides an alternative practical way to justify bond classification.

In this paper, we analyze the main characteristics of European Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), related to the demand for and access to external financial resources. We use microdata from an extensive database, elaborated by the European Central Bank and the European Commission: the Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises. Firstly, we consider a set of variables as determinants to the decision to apply for different financial instruments. Secondly, we use the same set of variables to analyze the actual access to these instruments. For each regression, several SMEs profiles were created, in order to detect SMEs archetypes according to their decisions. The results are thought-provoking, and highlight that differences in firms characteristics (size, innovative activities, etc.), influence not only the access to, but also the demand for external finance.