What is the impact of political decentralisation in Latin America? This book considers the problems raised by political decentralisation in the region and identifies the challenges ahead. Political decentralisation tends to devolve a certain amount of financial responsibility to the sub-national...

The Inter-American Development Bank and the OECD Development Centre created the International Forum on Latin American Perspectives as an annual meeting place of ideas and strategies from Latin America and from the OECD region. The tenth meeting of the Forum was held in Paris in November 1999 and...

The central question tackled here is that of the desirability of foreign direct investment over other flows, such as bank lending. There has been an undoubted rise in FDI flows as a proportion of all flows to the Latin American region, but how much of the cause is supply- or demand-driven...

This paper analyzes various dimensions of the quality of life in Montevideo. The paper finds that satisfaction with various public goods and services at the neighborhood level play a minor role in the overall reported well-being of individuals and in the satisfaction of life domains, such as...

This paper studies the effects of water sector privatization on consumers’ welfare in 46 municipalities in Colombia. First, the privatization process is described. Second, the paper evaluates the impact of privatization on access, price, and quality of water as well as health outcomes using...

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for the case of racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of mestizaje (racial mixtures).