Quarterly time series data from Canada and the Canadian provinces for the period 1976:1-2005:3 are examined to determine if the unemployment rates in the Canadian provinces are converging to the national rate of unemployment. Firstly, we check for existence of stochastic convergence using recent...

Peru is experiencing a deep political and fiscal decentralization process, especially since 2002. The newly created regional governments now share power and resources with the existing municipal governments as well as with the national or central government. The national government has...

One goal of this paper is to discussing the macroeconomic impact that an internacional commodity prices boom has in a small open economy under perfect capital mobility. A Mundell-Fleming model with some adaptations is used for the analysis of this real external shock. There are two effects: the...

Few ideas and activities have received as hyperbolic praise as those presented by Hernando de Soto on informality. Nobel prizes in economics, presidents of various countries, important magazines, and multilateral organizations have endorsed this author’s impulse to the official...

This article reviews the treatment of the concept of variables in empirical research in economics. It incorporates ideas from other quantitative areas, and are arranged in a conceptual framework. We present a taxonomy of the variables and discusses methodological issues that arise from it. We...

We analyze three concepts of market competition. Although in each one of them one can appreciate the different aspects of freedom, they also contribute specially to some of them. We propose that the "neoclassical general equilibrium" mainly contributes to the discussion of the outcomes of an...