This paper assesses the vulnerability of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) economies to external crises. It shows that while the average LAC economy has made significant strides to reduce vulnerability to crises to its historical minimum, there is still considerable room for improvement,...

We illuminate several important aspects of the nature and causes of growth and institutional change. To do this, we focus on the role resource pressures have played in the historic development of Hawaii's institutions. We discuss the Hawaiian story in the context of the natural co-evolution of...

This paper studies the role of global and regional variations in economic activity and policy in developed world in driving portfolio capital flows (PCF) to emerging markets (EMs) in a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) framework. Results suggest that PCFs to EMs depend mainly on...

Using panel co-integration techniques and a comprehensive dataset covering the period 1980-2013, this paper finds a positive and significant correlation between national saving and domestic investment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The estimated correlation is approximately 0.39;...

Data on the growth performances of countries with similar comparative (dis)advantage and political institutions reveal a striking variation across world regions. While some former autocracies such as the East Asian growth miracles have done remarkably well, others such as the Latin American...

This paper studies the effect of demographic transitions on the economy of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The paper builds a model of multi-regions of the world and derives the path of macroeconomic variables including aggregate output, capital, labor and the saving rate as economies...

The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing form private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of official lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank...