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...

This paper analyzes central banks’ role in banking crises in Latin America. It finds that, except in a handful of cases, where bank resolution was timely executed, central bank money was used in large scale to contain and manage systemic and small crises alike. However, pouring money into the...

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 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...

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 reviews the nature of the independence granted to central banks in Latin America after the reform adopted during the first half of the 1990s, quantifies the degree of their legal independence, and ascertains if there has been a negative correlation between legal central bank...

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...

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...