This paper discusses the theoretical arguments in favor of and against economic globalization and, with a view to ascertaining whether Latin America may be able to capture the globalization upside, examines the trends and salient features of Latin America's globalization as compared with that of...

This paper offers the first evidence on the prevalence of a central actor in modern growth theory?the engineer. Using newly collected sub-national, and international data as well as historical case studies, it then argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of...

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...

The objective of this paper is to study the evolution of the incidence and profile of nonstandard workers in selected countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe and Central Asia in the past two decades. The analysis of the profile of this group of workers focuses on three key...

The paper documents the major trends in financial development in Latin America and the Caribbean since the early 1990s. The paper compares trends in Latin America and the Caribbean with those in Asia, Eastern Europe, and advanced countries and compares countries within Latin America and the...

The returns to schooling or the skill premium is a key parameter in various literatures, including globalization and inequality and international migration. This paper explores the skill premium and its link to exports in Latin America, thus linking the skill premium to the emerging literature...

This study uses text mining techniques on almost 900 presidential "state-of-the-union" --type speeches from 10 Latin American countries from 1819 to 2016. The paper documents a sharp increase in recent decades in references to poverty and inequality. The study's long-term view shows that the way...

Universities in Latin America are increasingly considered instruments of social and economic development and face rising expectations in regard to supplying relevant skills, undertaking applied research, and engaging in commercial activity. The paper discusses trends and challenges within Latin...

This paper assesses the impact of the rise of China on the trade of Latin American and Caribbean economies. The study proposes an index to measure the impact on trade, which suggests sizable effects, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Paraguay. The paper uses the index...

This paper reviews the determinants of Latin America's uneven growth based on an accounting decomposition that breaks down countries' growth (relative to the world) into three trade-related channels: (i) an export pull measuring the traction exerted by the country's exports, (ii) an external...