Latin America`s enormous endowment of natural resources impacts many countries of the region. Economic liberalization in several countries was followed by rapid growth of foreign investment and exports of natural resource-intensive products. Growth of labor-intensive manufacturing industries was...

Recent literature on Latin American countries shows that private expenses as a share of the total expenditures in health tend to be higher the lower the nation`s level of economic development. This paper considers a discrete choice model of product differentiation, where consumer choice is based...

Have the economies of Latin America become less volatile as a result of the economic stabilization and structural reforms implemented during the past decade? The answer is a qualified “yes. ” The reforms have helped, but more needs to be done to ensure the macroeconomic stability required...

In light of recent results, the fight against poverty in Latin America has been far from satisfactory. The standard approach of multicultural credit agencies will continue to be limited if it does not stress the central role of the distribution as well as the accumulation of productive assets,...

We suggest that foreign banks may represent a trade-off for their developing country hosts. A portfolio model is developed to show that a more diversified international bank may be one of lower, overall risk and less susceptible to funding shocks but may react more to shocks that affect expected...

This paper processes 76 household surveys from 17 Latin American countries to document changes in poverty and inequality during the 1990s. We show that there is no country in Latin America where inequality declined during the 1990s. Poverty declined in 10 or 11 of the 17 countries for which...

High inequality has long been regarded as one of the main problems facing Latin American countries. To understand better the determinants of inequality and to help guide thinking about policy options, it is useful to know whether inequality mainly reflects low intergenerational mobility or...

East Asia and Latin America have diverged in several dimensions in the past three decades. This paper compares household saving behavior in two countries in each region (Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Taiwan). We make four contributions. First, we provide the first comparisons of savings in these...

After decades of trial, error, and occasional regress, the pieces of a successful Latin American economic model can be seen scattered among the leading economies of the region. The most traditional macroeconomic maladies of the emerging world, such as chronic fiscal imbalances and monetary...

This paper argues that there is no country in Latin America where we can confidently say that income inequality improved during the 1990s. We document this fact for the 15 countries where comparable household surveys, covering most of the population, are available. What we observe are genuine...