This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000–2008. The Brazilian experience is instructive as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate TFP...

Informality has important implications for productivity, economic growth, and the inequality of income. In recent years, the extent of informal employment has increased in many of Mexico's states, though highly heterogeneously. The substantial differences across states in terms of informal...

This paper studies the renegotiations of road concessions in Chile, Colombia and Peru for the period 1993-2010. First, it analyses the legal framework, the institutional design and the types of concessions of these countries and second, it uses a novel data composed of a sample of 61 of the 62...

This paper analyzes the self-selection patterns among Mexican return migrants during the period 1990–2010. To calculate the selection patterns, we nonparametrically estimate the counterfactual wages that the return migrants would have experienced had they never migrated by using the wage...

Mexico has achieved a high degree of decentralisation in public services, but the Mexican fiscal federal system has important shortcomings. States and municipalities have become heavily dependent on federal transfers to finance a growing share of public spending. This leaves the burden of...

This paper analyzes the causes of corruption in contemporary Bolivia. It argues that, along with the well-documented observation that richer countries tend, on average, to be less corrupt than poorer ones, corruption is directly dependent on FDI inflows, with higher levels of FDI associated with...

Managing and regulating the extractive industries can pose substantial challenges to minerals-rich countries. Aiming to overcome the “resource curse”, some countries attempt to generate greater gains from their natural resources by using trade policy instruments such as export restrictions....

In the early 1990’s, the Argentine government promoted a framework for productivity-based negotiations between firms and unions at low levels of organization. The policy weakened the industry-wide collective bargaining system, which sets working conditions for all firms in an industry. This...

The recovery from the current deep recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will require raising productivity through structural reforms. This implies a number of challenges for economic policies. With large parts of the economy shielded from competition, firms face weak incentives to become...

Brazil spends around 15% of GDP on different social benefits, but within these expenditures, different benefits have different social impacts. While the small conditional cash transfer programme Bolsa Família is well-targeted to the poor and has a strong diminishing effect on inequality,...