This paper describes how Latin America and the Caribbean has been integrating financially with countries in the North and South since the 2000s. The paper shows that the region is increasingly more connected with the rest of the world, even relative to gross domestic product. The region's...

This paper examines two sources of global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments and trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that foreign direct investment and trade can contribute to overall domestic productivity growth only when the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms is...

The author evaluates the effectiveness of policy measures adopted by Chile and Colombia, aiming to mitigate the deleterious effects of pro-cyclical capital flows. In the case of Chile, according to his Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) analysis, capital controls succeeded in reducing net...

The author attempts to analyze whether price-based controls on capital inflows are successful in insulating economies against external shocks. He presents results from vector auto regressive (VAR) models that indicate that Chile and Colombia, countries that adopted controls on capital inflows,...

The authors revisit the debt overhang question. They first use nonparametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer Curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial)...

The current account can be understood as the outcome of investment decisions made by domestic and foreign investors. These decisions can be decomposed into a portfolio rebalancing and a portfolio growth component. This paper provides empirical evidence of the importance of portfolio rebalancing...

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...

In many developing countries, the supply of skilled workers is likely to continue to be stronger than demand, and this should drive down the skill premium and reduce inequality. Within the limitations of any exercise based on simulations, this paper finds that the recently observed reduction in...

Labor market dynamics have played a significant role in the remarkable social gains experienced across Latin America over the recent past. Assessing the quality of employment, beyond the perspective of income, to include other fundamental aspects of jobs --such as whether jobs are secure,...

Combining macroeconomic and microeconomic data and three indicators of international market integration, this paper assesses the degree to which Latin American labor markets are integrated. The results suggest that relative to East Asia, Latin American labor markets are somewhat more integrated,...