This document studies the economic effect of windfall gains by examining a Peruvian natural experiment. The Camisea Fund for Socioeconomic Development (FOCAM) is an inter-governmental fiscal transfer scheme that allocates natural gas royalties generated by the Camisea Gas Project to eligible...

Inflation targeting has been adopted in a set of emerging economies, including eight countries in Latin America. The success of this regime may depend critically on the credibility of the target and the expectation that the authorities will take appropriate actions if the target is breached....

This paper uses joint scaling methods and similar items from three large-scale surveys to place voters, parties and politicians from different Latin American countries on a common ideological space. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the findings reveal that the "median" voter in Latin America...

This paper documents disparities in cognitive development-as measured by a receptive vocabulary test-between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of childhood (before and after early school years) in four developing countries: Peru,...

This paper seeks to identify the most promising fiscal strategy to boost long-term economic growth in Argentina and quantify its effects. To this end, the authors updated a growth-diagnostics study for Argentina and corroborated that low appropriability of social returns and insufficient public...

This paper uses data from the Global School-based Student Health Survey to investigate the prevalence of health risk behaviors, in particular substance use, risky sexual behavior, and violence among adolescents in 15 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Using logit regressions and...

This study analyzes the performance of Latin America and the Caribbean's agriculture between 1980 and 2012 looking at the contribution of inputs, and total factor productivity (TFP) to growth in output per worker. A growth accounting approach that goes along the lines of neoclassical growth...

Virtually all Latin American and Caribbean countries have established specialized organizations to promote their exports. Existing analyses of these organizations are at best partial and fragmentary. This paper aims at overcoming these limitations of the literature by presenting a consistent,...

Between 2000 and 2013, Latin America has considerably reduced poverty (from 46.3% to 29.7% of the population). In this paper, we use synthetic panels to show that, despite progress, the region remains characterized by substantial vulnerability that also affects the rising middle-class. More...