There is a long-standing literature that shows that fiscal adjustment is often implemented through cuts in public investment, including infrastructure (Roubini and Sachs, 1989; Hicks, 1991; De Haan et al. 1996). In this respect, the present paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution...

Public investment and infrastructure spending are often singled out for drastic cuts at times of fiscal retrenchment. Fiscal austerity in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by a sharp contraction in infrastructure spending. In 5 of the 9 major Latin American countries,...

FDI flows to developing countries surged in the 1990s, to become their leading source of external financing. This rise in FDI volume was accompanied by a marked change in its composition: investment taking the form of acquisition of existing assets (M&A) grew much more rapidly than investment in...

Latin American has lost substantial ground relative to other developing and developed regions in terms of the quality and quantity of infrastructure over the last two decades. For instance, Latin America’s infrastructure gap in infrastructure growth relative to that of the seven successful...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of infrastructure development on economic growth and income distribution using a large panel data set encompassing over 100 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000. The empirical strategy involves the estimation of simple equations for...

This paper explores empirically the role of risk and return factors in the observed evolution of net foreign asset positions of a large number of industrial and developing economies. The paper adopts a dynamic approach in which investors’ portfolios adjust gradually to their long-run...

There is widespread concern across Latin America that the provision of infrastructure services has suffered as a consequence of the retrenchment of the public sector and the insufficient response of the private sector to the opening up of infrastructure industries to private participation in...

The empirical literature on long-run real exchange rate behavior has shown mixed evidence due to problems involving the lack of long time series data and the low power of time-series unit root tests in small samples. The main objective of the present paper is to tackle these empirical issues by...

The main goal of the present paper is to estimate the equilibrium real exchange rate path for Chile using a simple model for the 1977.I – 2003.III period. Using cointegration techniques, we find a cointegrating relationship between the real exchange rate (RER) and its fundamentals —that is,...

This paper evaluates the impact of non-monetary factors on inflation for a sample of 97 countries over the period 1975-2005. We complement and extend the existing literature in the following dimensions: (i) we assemble a comprehensive set of inflation determinants classified in 5 groups — high...