Raising living standards continues to be the main challenge facing Guatemala, as a matter of economic success and social cohesion. This paper discusses the spending, financing, and delivery capacity aspects of a viable development strategy for Guatemala couched within the United Nations...

Following a benchmarking exercise, we estimate the spending required to reach satisfactory progress in the Sustainable Development Goals in the health, education, and infrastructure sectors in Brazil. We find that there is room for savings in education (up to 1.5 percentage point of GDP) and...

Past studies on the relationship between electricity consumption and temperature have primarily focused on individual countries. Many regions are understudied as a result of data constraint. This paper studies the relationship on a global scale, overcoming the data constraint by using grid-level...

This brief paper accompanies the Green Energy and Jobs tool, which is a simple excel-based tool to estimate the job-creation potential of greening the electricity sector. Specifically, it calculates the net job gains or losses from increasing the level of energy efficiency, and from increasing...

This paper studies the effect of climate change mitigating policies on innovation in clean energy technologies. Results suggest that the tightening of environmental policies since the early 1990s have made a statistically and economically significant contribution to the increase in clean...

With the debt obligation of Itaipú Binational being completed paid off by 2023, the Annex C of the Treaty of Itaipú, which governs the operation and revenue distribution of the Itaipú Dam, is due for review and possible revisions. The implications for Paraguay’s export revenues and fiscal...

The setting of public utility prices involves balancing various competing government policy objectives, from equity concerns to ensuring the financial sustainability of providers and balancing public finances. In practice, public utility pricing often departs significantly from government...

European power markets are in the midst of unprecedented changes, with a record-breaking surge in energy prices.This paper investigates the impact of green power resources on the level and volatility of wholesale electricity prices at a granular level, using monthly observations for a panel of...

Over the last decade China’s investment in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has increased substantially in volume and become more diversified from natural resources to other industries. Using cross-border mergers and acquisitions data, we demonstrate that since mid-2010s China’s...

This paper looks at some technical issues when using CDS data, and if these are incorporated, the analysis or regression results are likely to benefit. The paper endorses the use of stochastic recovery in CDS models when estimating probability of default (PD) and suggests that stochastic...