The recent political crisis in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has again called the attention of the international community This paper tries to describe the development path of Haiti, and advances some hypotheses explaining its reasons, Since the traditional explanations...

This paper examines, by using several econometric techniques, the effects of foreign reserves and other fundamental variables on the exchange rate using the target zone theory, This paper uses monthly data for Chile from January 1979 to November 1997 The data used consists of foreign reserves,...

The Bolivian evidence shows that microfinance lending technologies are well designed to cope with different kinds of risk. The innovations provided in this financial sector show more strengths than weaknesses to overcome information asymmetries. Furthermore, group and individual loans are...

This paper uses international data on voter turnout and individual-level data to describe levels and distribution of political participation in Latin America. The paper finds that, while voter turnout in Latin America is rather low, the analysis of more general indicators of political activism...

At the end of 2003, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that around 2.7 million people in the U.S. were of Central American origin While this community represents a potential market for Central American exports, no study had previously been carried out to describe the ethnic markets for Central...

The purpose of this study is to explain the statistical variation in economic growth rates in a broad cross-section of countries, over the period 1980-1999. This problem will be addressed within the framework of the so-called "growth-regression" approach, which seeks to explain this variation by...

Recently, many scholars have tried to explain how electoral systems are linked to corruption. Several theories emerged but still no consensus has been reached. With a dataset of about 50 democratic countries considered over 10 years we try to understand which of the effects highlighted in the...

The Fisher and Seater (1993) methodology is used to test for the long run neutrality of money in Guatemala, 1950-2001. Real GDP, real per capita GDP, and the money measures, M1 and M2, are integrated of order one [I (l)]. Given these orders of integration, the Fisher-Seater neutrality test can...

This paper builds on Freund and Weinhold (2000) to show that the results of that paper can be applied to the case of Bolivia. We review the implications ofthe Freund and Weinhold model, emphasizing the effects of the internet on increasing trade and lessening the effects of historical trading...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. To this end, we set up a small-scale macroeconomic model of a dual economy to capture the transmission mechanisms through which the deregulation of product and...