Problems to Be Faced Measuring Real Income per Capita: The Case of Mexico

Abstract

The last 35 years have been characterized, worldwide, for lack of economic growth and increasing inequality in income distribution and its concentration. This has resulted in increased poverty and falling purchasing power of the middle classes, which has become the most serious problem with which we enter the twenty-first century. Mexico has been no exception. This article covers the first part of the research I'm doing in the 9th. Researchers call for 2015-2016 of the De La Salle University Bajio in Leon, Mexico. In the second part I will discuss inequality in income deciles in which is statistically divided our population and the way in which the concentration of income in fewer hands is affecting the market performance. This research has required having historical series covering the last 57 years of economic and population growth in Mexico. Measure the evolution of gross domestic product (GDP) from the beginning of the presidential terms from 1959 to 2015. It has been problematic since in Mexico there are not series covering the entire period. I had to go to the World Bank data (WB) which provides them from 1960. We found discrepancies in GDP series between those of WB, International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations Organization (UNO) and the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI) from Mexico. The second difficulty appeared in the series of the population of our country. There are also discrepancies between census data and estimates of the same INEGI. Moreover, the series of WB and Penn World Table (PWT) also show differences between them. Converting the results of real GDP per capita to dollars had no difficulty due to information from the Mexican Central Bank (BM). The conversionto international dollars as estimated by the purchasing power parity (PPP) was obtained from PWT 8.1.