The depth of and access to financial services provided by banks throughout Latin America are extremely low in spite of its recognized importance for economic activity, employment and poverty alleviation. Low financial depth and access hurts the poor the most and is due to a variety of obstacles...

This paper finds that shocks to net financial inflows, world oil prices, the U.S. growth rate, and the lagged real exchange rate explain most of the fluctuations in Mexico’s annual growth since 1979. The paper also estimates how the effects of these external constraints have changed since...

After a decade of economic reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, making them more open and more competitive, and a decade of substantial increases in public spending on education, health and other social programs in virtually all countries, poverty and...

After a decade of economic and political reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, poverty and high inequality remain deeply entrenched. Integration into the global economy in the 1990s brought increased prosperity only to a small minority of households in...

In Latin America, privatization started earlier and spread farther and more rapidly than in almost any other part of the world. More, and larger, firms were sold, and more proceeds were raised. Despite positive microeconomic results, privatization is highly and increasingly unpopular in the...

We compute Public Sector Performance (PSP) and Public Sector Efficiency (PSE) indicators and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) efficiency scores for a sample of twenty-three Latin American and Caribbean Countries (LAC) to measure efficiency of public spending for the period 2001-2010. Our results...

Occupational health is increasingly recognized as an important public health issue in Latin American and the Caribbean. One major concern is the absence of reliable data on its magnitude and economic consequences. The first part of the paper presents the official statistics on workplace...