Latin America suffered a profound state crisis in the 1980s, which prompted not only the wave of macroeconomic and deregulation reforms known as the Washington Consensus, but also a wide variety of institutional or 'second generation' reforms. 'The State of State Reform in Latin America' reviews...

Government intervention in the construction sector as a way to boost the economy has been a constant in Colombia for the past 90 years. This paper explicitly tests the impact of the most recent of such interventions: a subsidy to the mortgage interest rate. The results show that the subsidy...

This paper examines the impact of the availability of fiscal revenues from nonrenewable resources on other revenues of Latin American and Caribbean resource-exporting countries. It compares the performance of nonresource revenues in these countries to that in other countries in the region. The...

In this paper we present evidence suggesting that international migrant remittances generally lead to improved developmental outcomes. Using a cross-section of Mexican municipalities in the year 2000, we show that increases in the fraction of households receiving international remittances are...

The initial stages of exchange rate-based stabilizations have been generally characterized by a consumption boom, a deterioration of the trade balance and the current account, and an appreciation of the real exchange rate. It is only at the later stages that the economy falls into recession. Tax...

Although recent research has shed new light on the political determinants and economic consequences of tax lawmaking, existing analyses rely on coarse data measuring political aggregates. Consequently, little is known about the political processes determining how tax legislation is written or...

This study looks at several major legislative actions in 2002 that will substantially affect trade negotiations with the United States, and examines the US import protection for agricultural products that will be critical in trade negotiations with Central American countries. The two important...

Economic growth is often a kind of miracle because like most miracles, it is not easy to explain. Countries that have not grown for a century, at times begin to grow at a fast pace, while countries that were growing fast stop growing. From time to time economists have advanced particular...

The paper is concerned with the high protection cum high growth experience in Brazil until the second half of the 1980s and its crisis. The paper is structured in four sections. The first section is a summary of the arguments presented in the following three sections of the paper. Section II...

When it comes to assess the sustainability of fiscal policy and public debt in Andean countries, two idiosyncratic facts of fiscal revenues have to be considered. First, fiscal revenues coming from natural resources represent up to 44% of total fiscal revenues, producing a strong correlation...