What are the reasons for and the costs of Latin America's volatility? Because there is no consensus on these fundamental questions, there is no consensus on the appropriate policy response to macroeconomic volatility in Latin America, and other shock-prone countries. This paper provides new...

The central question tackled here is that of the desirability of foreign direct investment over other flows, such as bank lending. There has been an undoubted rise in FDI flows as a proportion of all flows to the Latin American region, but how much of the cause is supply- or demand-driven...