This report examines the quality of public policies in Latin America and the Caribbean after more than a decade of political and economic reform. A wide variety of examples and case studies are presented in an analytical framework to help explain why policies that work in certain institutional...

Abundant empirical evidence links well-functioning institutions and good governance to better economic and social outcomes. It is thus an important challenge to determine which conjunction of factors produces better institutions. Along this line, the objective of this paper is twofold. First, it...

This paper discusses the ways in which macroeconomic developments can put stress on banks, and in extreme cases lead to banking crises. These macroeconomic causes of bank vulnerability and crisis have important implications for regulatory regimes, and for macroeconomic policy itself. Much of the...

Natural disasters are an important source of vulnerability in the Caribbean region. Despite being one of the more disaster-prone areas of the world, it has the lowest levels of insurance coverage. This paper examines the vulnerability of Belizes public finance to the occurrence of hurricanes and...

This paper presents theory and evidence on the determinants of the size of the informal sector. We propose a simple theoretical model in which the informal sector's size is negatively related to institutional quality and positively related to income inequality. These predictions are then...

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...

This paper shows that budget deficits account for a relatively small fraction of debt growth and that stock-flow reconciliation, which is often considered a residual entity, is one of the key determinants of debt dynamics. After having explained the importance of the stock-flow reconciliation,...

Drawing on previously unused objective institutional data, we provide evidence for the causal link between rent-seeking behavior and democracy in Uruguay, a country where both rent-seeking behavior and political shifts have varied widely in the last 80 years, but where ethnolinguistic...

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...

Este documento fue presentado en la Conferencia "MERCOSUR: En busca de una nueva agenda", realizada en la Fundación Getulio Vargas en Rio de Janeiro, en junio de 2003. Considerando la dinámica de las políticas emergentes, que apuntan a un renovado interés en profundizar la iniciativa...