What is the impact of political decentralisation in Latin America? This book considers the problems raised by political decentralisation in the region and identifies the challenges ahead. Political decentralisation tends to devolve a certain amount of financial responsibility to the sub-national...

This paper considers whether institutional factors, in this instance electoral systems and procedures, affect Latin American countries' fiscal performance as measured by the size of the public sector, fiscal deficits, the size of the public debt, and the degree of procyclality of fiscal policy....

This public expenditure review is produced jointly by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and focuses on social sectors spending and leaves aside infrastructure and other sectors. This report, finalized in June 2002 and discussed with Authorities in mid-August 2002, does not...

In this post-modern world of high capital mobility, countries are being disciplined by the anonymous capital market. One view of the situation -perhaps the prevalent view among economists- is that Wall Street gets into your hair because you are running an unsustainable economic program and...

The last Public Expenditure Review for Ecuador (PER) was produced in 1993. More than a decade later, the purpose of this report is to provide the Ecuadorian authorities with the World Bank's and Inter-American Development Bank's joint comprehensive account of their diagnoses and recommendations...

The last Public Expenditure Review for Ecuador (PER) was produced in 1993. More than a decade later, the purpose of this report is to provide the Ecuadorian authorities with the World Bank's and Inter-American Development Bank's joint comprehensive account of their diagnoses and recommendations...

This paper assesses the effects of total public debt (external and domestic) on social expenditure worldwide and in Latin America using an unbalanced panel of around 50 countries for the period 1985-2003. The most robust and important finding is that higher debt ratios do reduce social...