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In Memoriam: Jaime Ros

Just as UNU-WIDER was disseminating the very recent publication in World Development journal an article in which Carlos Ibarra and Jaime Ros analysed the factors explaining the decline of the labour income share in Mexico, we received the sad news that Jaime had passed away. Jaime was part of the Mexico team in the UNU-WIDER project Inequality in the Giants analysing the trends and determinants of inequality in key large developing countries, and the newly-published article was part of the comprehensive research work.

Jaime’s collaboration with UNU-WIDER starts from almost from the very beginning, when the institute was first established in Helsinki in the mid-1980s. At that time, Mexico was going through rough times as the result of an unprecedented debt crisis and the joint research done by Jaime Ros and Nora Lustig on the Mexican experience contributed to Lance Taylor’s writing when authoring one of the first UNU-WIDER books, Varieties of Stabilization Experience (Clarendon Press 1988). This research work had continuity within publications, with another book edited by Lance Taylor, The Rocky Road to Reform (MIT Press 1993), that included a chapter in which, with a better temporal perspective, Jaime and Nora analysed and described in more detail the traumatic Mexican experience.

Jaime Ros was a true scholar, an independent thinker who ploughed his own field of research. He possessed a strong intellectual curiosity for the workings of the world, but also a charming down-to-earthness putting those around him at ease. He will be much missed by very many.