This paper examines the impact of ideology on tax revenues in Latin America, using a panel of 17 countries from 1990 to 2010. As a first approach, a fixed- effects model is used to identify the impact of ideology on taxation; left-leaning governments are associated with increases in total tax...

Latin America`s enormous endowment of natural resources impacts many countries of the region. Economic liberalization in several countries was followed by rapid growth of foreign investment and exports of natural resource-intensive products. Growth of labor-intensive manufacturing industries was...

Poverty reduction remains one of the main challenges for Latin America at the end of the 20th century. Most of the countries in the region are classified as middle income by international standards, and yet they register poverty rates well above what would be expected given their GDP per capita....

The main contribution of this paper with respect to previous work is the use of data on subjective perceptions to identify the Latin American middle classes. This paper provides a set of comparisons between objective and subjective definitions of middle-class using data from the 2007 World...

This paper follows two strategies to address whether the rich save more. First, the paper implements a two-stage procedure in which the household's lifetime income is instrumented with the education level of the household head and the education level of his/her partner. Second, using information...

Recent literature on Latin American countries shows that private expenses as a share of the total expenditures in health tend to be higher the lower the nation`s level of economic development. This paper considers a discrete choice model of product differentiation, where consumer choice is based...

In light of recent results, the fight against poverty in Latin America has been far from satisfactory. The standard approach of multicultural credit agencies will continue to be limited if it does not stress the central role of the distribution as well as the accumulation of productive assets,...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...

This paper processes 76 household surveys from 17 Latin American countries to document changes in poverty and inequality during the 1990s. We show that there is no country in Latin America where inequality declined during the 1990s. Poverty declined in 10 or 11 of the 17 countries for which...

High inequality has long been regarded as one of the main problems facing Latin American countries. To understand better the determinants of inequality and to help guide thinking about policy options, it is useful to know whether inequality mainly reflects low intergenerational mobility or...