The availability of windfall revenues from natural resource exports or foreign aid potentially weakens governments' incentives to design efficient tax systems. Cross-country data for developing countries provide evidence for this hypothesis, using a World Bank indicator of "efficiency of revenue...

Developing countries face a major challenge of decarbonizing their light-duty vehicle fleet and transitioning to the broad use of electric vehicles. However, there is little evidence on which policies can most effectively facilitate that transition in these countries, distinguished by relatively...

Tax expenditures, in the form of tax provisions, are government expenditures. They are conceptually and functionally distinct from those tax provisions whose purpose is to raise revenue. Tax expenditure programs are comparable to entitlement programs. Therefore, tax expenditures must be analyzed...

One of the important factors for economic development is the existence of an effective tax system. This paper deals with the concept and empirical estimation of countries' taxable capacity and tax effort. It employs a cross-country study from a sample of 110 developing and developed countries...

Income inequality in Latin America ranks among the highest in the world. It can be traced back to the unequal distribution of assets (especially land and education) in the region. But the extent to which asset inequality translates into income inequality depends on the redistributive capacity of...

This paper evaluates the degree of consumption insurance enjoyed by Latin American and Caribbean countries, with respect to various reference areas, by estimating a parameter expressing the sensitivity of a country's consumption growth to a measure of idiosyncratic shocks to income. The paper...

This paper contributes to the literature that explores the link between regulatory governance and sector performance. The paper develops an index of regulatory governance and estimates its impact on sector performance, showing that indeed regulation and its governance matter. The authors use two...

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution of U.S. imports using detailed trade data over the 1990-2003 period. The authors use a two-stage least squares framework in order to identify the elasticity parameter of interest. The authors use the elasticity estimates to assess the extent to...

Latin America is together with Sub-Saharan Africa the most unequal region of the world. This paper documents recent inequality trends in the Latin American region, going beyond traditional measures of income inequality. The paper also reviews some of the explanations that have been put forward...

This paper provides an analysis of the two channels of regional integration: integration via markets and integration via agreements. Given that East Asia and Latin America are two fertile regions where both forms of integrations have taken place, the authors examine the experiences of these two...