This book strives to better understand the recent labor market trends in the countries of the region and the factors that underlie the failure of many of those countries to create more, but especially more productive and rewarding jobs. In particular, the book addresses four main questions: how...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution of U.S. imports using detailed trade data over the 1990-2003 period. The authors use a two-stage least squares framework in order to identify the elasticity parameter of interest. The authors use the elasticity estimates to assess the extent to...

Recent literature has emphasized the importance of transport costs and infrastructure in explaining trade, access to markets, and increases in per capita income. For most Latin American countries transport costs are a greater barrier to U.S. markets than import tariffs. The authors investigate...

The relevance of transport costs has increased as liberalization continues to reduce artificial barriers to trade. Countries need to adopt policies to get closer to global markets. Can improvements in infrastructure and regulation reduce transport costs? Is it worthwhile to implement policies...

With the transition in Estonia, worker flows increased greatly, driven by an increase in job flows. As the situation stabilized, the job and worker flows converged at rates similar to those observed in Western economies. In 1989, job reallocation accounted for only a small fraction of overall...

In this paper the authors provide an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. They rely on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise...

This paper reviews the process of job creation and destruction across a sample of 16 industrial and emerging economies over the past decade. It exploits a harmonized firm-level data set drawn from business registers and enterprise census data. The paper assesses the importance of technological...