This paper shows evidence that suggests the economic slowdown in Latin America and the Caribbean has already translated into slowing social gains, including decelerating poverty reduction, stagnating growth of the middle class, and lower income growth. The countries of South America outperformed...

Although there is wide recognition of the negative consequences of policy volatility for countries' long-term economic growth, there is limited empirical work on this subject. One of the reasons is the difficulty of measuring policy volatility over long periods of time, especially in developing...

This study uses text mining techniques on almost 900 presidential "state-of-the-union"-type speeches from 10 Latin American countries from 1819 to 2016. The paper documents a sharp increase in recent decades in references to poverty and inequality. The study's long-term view shows that the way...