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...

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...

To comprehend how development really happens, it is necessary to understand the evolution of its drivers and their relationship with individuals' income. This paper analyzes the expansion of access to education and basic services in Latin America and its association with the evolution of incomes...

Poverty estimates usually lag behind two years, which makes it difficult to provide real-time poverty analysis to assess the impact of economic crisis and shocks among the less well-off, and subsequently limits policy responses. This paper takes advantage of up-to-date average economic welfare...

This paper explores perceptions of distributive justice in Latin America during the 2000s and their relationship with income inequality. In line with the fall in income inequality in the region, the paper documents a widespread, although modest, decrease in the share of the population that...

Two long-established stylized facts in the urban and development economics literatures are that: (a) a country's level of economic development is strongly positively correlated with its level of urbanization; and (b) a country's level of urbanization is strongly negatively correlated with the...

This paper documents access to services and ownership of infrastructure-related durables in the water, energy, telecom, and transport areas, based on harmonized household survey data covering 1.6 million households in 14 Latin American countries during 1992 to 2012. The paper provides a...