Most recent cross-country analyses of economic growth have neglected the importance of physical geography. This paper reviews the distinctive development challenges faced by economies situated in tropical climates. Using geographic information system (GIS) mapping, the paper presents evidence...

Economic variables are known to move asymmetrically over the business cycle: quickly and sharply during crises, but slowly and gradually during recoveries. Not known is the fact that this asymmetry is stronger in countries with less-developed financial systems. This new fact is documented using...

This paper aims to advance understanding about the relationship between taxation and inequality in developing countries, focusing on the recent experience of Latin America. Although the tax system was regressive in the 1990s, tax changes promoted equality in the first decade of the 2000s. In...

Gender gaps in labour force participation in developing countries persist despite income growth or structural change. We assess this persistence across economic geographies within countries, focusing on youth employment in off-farm wage jobs. We combine household survey data from 12 low- and...

We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Our main contributions are: (i) providing new and...

A developing country often pegs its exchange rate to a single currency, such as the U.S. dollar, even though it faces a higher inflation rate than the country to which it is pegged. As a consequence, it experiences real exchange-rate misalignments and a series of easily-anticipated devaluations....

One of the nest serious consequences of the debt crisis of 1982 has been the reduction in the accessibility to the world capital market for most developing countries. This situation has proved to be particularly serious for Latin American nations. At this juncture, a key question is how to...

This paper investigates the potential impacts of the degree of divergence in open macroeconomic policies in the context of the trilemma hypothesis. Using an index that measures the relative policy divergence among the three trilemma policy choices, namely monetary independence, exchange rate...