The issue of institutional support for innovations in Latin American countries has been examined in this paper. We use aprirori theoretical knowledge on this issue in order to derive one econometric model out of a theoretical framework. The influence on human capital variable on innovations...

Annotated presentation made at the conference “Hacia una Mayor Competitividad e Integración de América Latina y el Caribe: la contribución de la banca de desarrollo”,on the occasion of the ALIDE Annual Meeting, Asunción, Paraguay, 19-20 May 2011. The paper describes first how regional...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the innovative activities of business groups in Latin America. It compares the innovativeness of group-affiliated firms (GAFs) and standalone firms (SAFs), and it investigates how country-specific institutional factors – financial, legal, and labor...

The Japanese government introduced new foreign aid guidelines in 1991 and it pledged to impose aid sanctions on those aid recipient countries whose governments violated human rights or democratic principles. The introduction of the new aid guidelines is expected to produce a certain effect on...

The diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is becoming a central policy issue for developing countries, being identified by international policy-makers and scholars as an important driver of knowledge, innovation and economic growth. We analyze ICT access patterns in...

This paper uses time-series data from nineteen Latin American countries and the U.S. to test for income convergence using two existing definitions of convergence and a new testable definition of β-convergence. Only Dominican Republic and Paraguay were found to pair-wise converge according to...

This paper analyzes the relationship between the intensity of international trade flows and labor productivity for 28 industries in the five main economies in the region (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico)using the Arellano-Bond generalized method of moments (GMM)estimator. The...

An increasingly important component of total world trade is intra-industry trade (IIT). The large volume of literature on IIT is reflective of this importance. However, this extensive literature has focused almost completely on explaining the causes of IIT. This focus has left a puzzling gap in...

This paper analyses the privatization of utilities in Bolivia, detailing the particularities of the capitalization mechanism which was used for this purpose. The analysis suggests that capitalization and regulation, and the liberalization of the utilities sector more generally, succeeded in...

This brief reviews two rounds of pension reforms in ten Latin American countries to determine whether they are moving away from individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Although the idea is provocative, we conclude that the notion of “moving away from IRAs” is insufficient to characterize the...