This paper analyzes five Productive Development Policies (PDPs) implemented in Costa Rica, finding that they are not optimally addressing market failures. Moreover, government failures rather than market failures represent the main justification for PDPs. Even in the presence of market failures,...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...

In the last twenty years economics has created much of lasting value and real potential: it has been a very fertile period. But economics has also suffered from what I shall term "collective amnesia" covering whole areas of public policy. And on policy and the role of government it has,...