In this paper detailed information on the budget institutions of Latin American countries is collected. These institutions are classified on a hierarchical/collegial scale, as a function of the existence of constraints on the deficit and voting rules.

The effects of market and policy reforms on poverty and inequality in Latin America have been of considerable concern. The region continues to have relatively great income inequalities. Two different societies with the same income distribution may have different levels of social welfare because...

Financial turmoil is becoming a fact of life in Latin America. The 1990s have been characterized by enormous volatility in the magnitude and cost of capital flows. The correlation of capital swings across disparate countries suggests that the quality of emerging market policies in addition to...

Latin America`s enormous endowment of natural resources impacts many countries of the region. Economic liberalization in several countries was followed by rapid growth of foreign investment and exports of natural resource-intensive products. Growth of labor-intensive manufacturing industries was...

This paper shows that the factors affecting labor supply have been key determinants of the changes in employment, unemployment, and income differentials in Latin America in the 1990s. The two main forces driving labor supply in the region have been demographics and education.

In this paper, social mobility is measured by looking at the extent to which family background determines socioeconomic success. An index of social mobility for developing countries is proposed based on the correlation of schooling gaps between siblings.

This paper processes 76 household surveys from 17 Latin American countries to document changes in poverty and inequality during the 1990s. We show that there is no country in Latin America where inequality declined during the 1990s. Poverty declined in 10 or 11 of the 17 countries for which...

This paper tests the sensitivity of poverty indexes to the choice of adult equivalence scales, assumptions about the existence of economies of scale in consumption, methods for treating missing and zero incomes, and different adjustments to handle income misreporting. We also perform sensitivity...

This paper develops and applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of economy-wide reforms on wage differentials, using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1980-1998. The results indicate that reform...

This paper studies the proposition that capital inflows tend to take the form of FDI--i. e. , the share of FDI in total liabilities tends to be higher--in countries that are safer, more promising and with better institutions and policies. It finds that this view is patently wrong since it stands...