Housing for most Peruvians is improving but is still grossly inadequate. Nonetheless, public housing finance policies mainly involve programs that subsidize middle-income families and banks that lend to them. Research summarized in this paper indicates that financing will not be the main...

In 2001, Mexico introduced a comprehensive federal housing policy package. The results have been quantitatively impressive; however, there are qualitative concerns. It is also uncertain whether current subsidy programs have negative financial implications for participating mortgage issuers, as...

In Guatemala there are substantial and growing imbalances in the housing market; at the same time, financial markets remain shallow and underdeveloped. The analytical framework applied in this paper starts by identifying the types of market failures responsible for the underdevelopment of the...

El sistema financiero de Honduras sufrió el impacto de la crisis financiera de 2009 con un deterioro de los indicadores de calidad de activos y de rentabilidad, que posteriormente experimentaron una recuperación en 2010. En el último año se ha podido notar una preferencia de los agentes por...

This policy brief reviews the experience of the countries under the Euro currency, focusing on those that have been under significant pressure in recent years— Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, referred to as “emerging” economies. At first they experienced stable growth and converged to...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

This paper is part of the project "Financial Dedollarization: Policy Options" launched by the Inter-American Development Bank. The purpose of the project is to contribute to the policy dialogue on the macroeconomic and prudential risks associated with financial dollarization as well as to...

This paper surveys housing finance in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama. The development of a secondary mortgage-backed securities market in Costa Rica is very limited despite a broad legal framework, while in El Salvador it is nonexistent and in Panama has not grown due to high liquidity. In...

La estabilización de las economías y una transformación profunda pero silenciosa de las instituciones ocurrieron en forma paralela en América Latina en las últimas décadas. Este artículo analiza los canales de influencia de los cambios de las instituciones fiscales y de los sistemas...

The microinsurance market in Latin America is still in its embryonic phase. The purpose of this technical note is to better inform donors, national governments, and insurance companies interested in promoting financial inclusion about how they can accelerate the development of microinsurance...