Over the past decade we have witnessed a double convergence. Aid donors have developed a growing interest in the private sector while private banks have set about creating corporate social responsibility programs, sustainable lending and microfinance programmes. As a consequence, the dialogue...

Strong growth in China and India has led to improvements in raw-material exporting countries' terms of trade and attracted complementary finance. The long-term challenge for these countries, where institutions are often fragile, is to avoid the so-called “resource curse”. This paper aims to...

In this paper we test the impact of elections on fiscal policy in Latin American economies in comparison to OECD countries over the period 1990-2006. We find that in Latin American countries, the average primary balance declines by an amount close to 0.7 per cent of GDP during an election year,...

Private capital movements have risen in recent decades, and bank flows have been part of this story. Some empirical studies have analysed the political drivers of private international liquidity, but paradoxically very few have looked at the political economy of bank flows. Even less research...

The Democratic Banker (03/2007) (Other Languages : FR / ES) Policy Insights No.38 by Javier Santiso Banks contribute not only to the economic development of emerging countries but also to political development. International bank flows in an emerging country tend to grow during the three years...

Latin American Countries vary widely in their institutional capacity to conduct economic policy analysis. Capacity for policy analysis is a necessary condition for economic reform but capacity for implementation is also needed. The point of contact between these two capacities - to analyse and...