This paper presents development accounting exercises in Latin America using novel databases and methods to investigate the robustness of its results. While total factor productivity initially appears to be the most important driver of output per worker gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean,...

Rapid and sustained economic growth in the emerging world has brought new members, notably China, into the group of middle-income countries. Reaching this level of income, however, has historically presented countries with a new set of challenges to development, resulting in slowing growth and...

A key higher education policy question is about the financing of this sector. Who, why and how higher education should be paid for are debated around the world by governments, the academic community, students, experts and civil society. This is true of Ibero-America. The meetings of their heads...

Can devaluations and exchange controls be co-ordinated at the regional or global level, to lessen their beggar-thy-neighbour character? Probably not without co-ordination mechanisms among monetary and fiscal authorities like the ones found in the EU. How precisely the mechanisms may apply to...

This paper displays and discusses historical data on sovereign debt prices for two Latin American countries and provides a signalling framework to account for the following phenomena: (a) prices for old (defaulted) and newly-issued debts were the same, but such prices diverge and rise sharply...

After a review of the literature, this paper concludes that there is potential for significant “spillover effects” from FDI into host countries. However, it identifies some limitations of this potential to do with the stock of human capital, the interest in local firms of promoting skills...

This paper investigates the consequences of Basel II for international capital flows to emerging markets. The paper shows that the magnitude of effects critically depends on a number of assumptions, including: the mapping of risk weights to ratings, assumptions about required return on capital,...

Differences in inequality between Latin American countries are not so much caused by globalisation as by a variety of political and economic structures and government policies. Hostile elites have made democracy fragile and are delaying the mass education and tax-driven income redistribution...

This Technical Paper reports on a body of research conducted for the OECD Development Centre by Donald J. Robbins. It examines the patterns and determinants of rapidly rising educational attainment in six Latin American countries — Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay —...

China’s economy has expanded by leaps and bounds, with dazzling progress since it first opened to foreign investment and reform in 1978. Over the last 25 years and after a long period of economic autarky, the country has emerged as a major player in world trade. Its accession to the World...