Technical Change in Mexico’s Northwestern Multinational Corporations (2005-2017)

Abstract

Introduction: The present research contributes to the current of studies on the biased technological change (Acemoglu, 2002, 2007, 2009), that is to say, the technological development and its effect in the labor market, where the highest productivity of the employees are due to the use of technological innovations and/or existing technologies that are incorporated into the Company, specifically in multinational corporations (MNC). The hypothesis of this work is that, in MNCs there is inefficiency in the assignment of tasks and this leads to assigning employment to people with skills not suitable for their tasks, which obstructs technological progress. The objective is to demonstrate that in the CMN of northwestern Mexico, the technological change is conditioned, where CMN hire personnel with medium and low qualifications to perform abstract tasks.

Method: The MNCs assigns tasks (of different technological level) to people who offers different qualifications (schooling years), where the assignment by the MNCs represents an endogenous technological change, and the supply of labor an exogenous change. Data from the ENOE is used, making a descriptive explanation for northwest Mexico, and a conditional Logit regression analysis, which shows both exogenous and endogenous effects in the assignment of people tasks in MNCs both for 2005 and for 2017.                       

Results: The findings show that, there is no correspondence between skills and tasks in the MNCs, which conditions the technological change increasing de demand of low technological jobs.                       

Discussion or Conclusion: It is shown that workers with higher qualifications are equally assigned to manual or abstract tasks, which evidences a problem of asymmetric information, because the MNCs do not have clear information about the qualifications of the workers, they assign them inefficiently to tasks with different technological levels.