This paper decomposes labor force participation, the unemployment rate, and the employment shares of self-employment, and of the formal and informal salaried sectors into age, cohort, and time effects. The life cycle patterns of labor force participation and formal employment follow a standard...

Latin America has been dominated by growth expansions that, more often than not, have ended in crises and protracted periods of stagnation. This has led to poor growth performance during most of the past century. This paper reviews Latin American growth experiences and discusses some particular...

This article examines the role that regulated Micro Finance Organizations (MFO) have played in the Bolivian financial sector development. Using occasional references, the paper also acknowledges the contribution of non-regulated MFO in improving welfare of poor population sectors. Among policy...

This paper aims to identify the major factors that lead to school abandonment in an urban surrounding, namely, the shantytowns of Fortaleza, northeast Brazil. We use an extensive survey addressing risk factors faced by the population in these neighborhoods, which covered both in-school and...

This paper examines the behavior of real GDP (levels and growth rates), unemployment, inflation, bank credit, and real estate prices in a twenty one-year window surrounding selected adverse global and country-specific shocks or events. The episodes include the 1929 stock market crash, the 1973...

This paper compares growth conditions in China and Latin America to assess fears that China will displace Latin America in the coming decades. China’s strengths include the size of the economy, macroeconomic stability, abundant low-cost labor, the rapid expansion of physical infrastructure,...

This paper draws the broad trends of Latin American economic development and its relations to the world economy since 1870. It presents the raw materials dependence of the region, its industrialization strategy, the incidence of unstable capital flows, as well as of macroeconomic policy, as the...

This study takes stock of the institutional reform of monetary policy in Latin America since the early 1990s. It argues that strengthening the legal independence of central banks, together with macroeconomic policies, was instrumental in reducing inflation from three-digit annual rates in the...

Based on the definition of middle class as that population who face low probability of falling into poverty, we present some trends for Latin America. The percentage of middle class has increased significantly, from 21.9 percent in 2000 to 34.3 percent in 2012. Since 2009, the size of the middle...

The purpose of this work is to study the structure of the mobile phone industry in Latin American countries, identifying the existence of strategic groups and analyzing business performance differences between them. The final aim is to find the competitive advantages of the groups identified and...