This report by the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) of the World Bank studies the region's fiscal policies. After reviewing LAC's growth performance, Chapter 1 provides an accounting of its financing needs during the 21st Century to understand how such a...

Africa lags behind other regions in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). In some circumstances, there are obvious explanations for the absence of FDI, such as a high incidence of war. In this paper, we examine the role that monetary and exchange rate policy may have played in explaining...

Even after one of the most severe multi-year crises on record in the advanced economies, the received wisdom in policy circles clings to the notion that high-income countries are completely different from their emerging market counterparts. The current phase of the official policy approach is...

Since 1990 capital has started to move from industrial countries to developing regions like Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Reentry into international capital markets is a welcome turn of events for most countries. However, capital inflows are often associated with inflationary...

During the past two years Latin America has received sizable international capital inflows. This paper compares the recent experience with that of the late 1970s. The analysis examines differences and similarities between the two episodes in three broad areas: domestic macroeconomic conditions...

Devaluation is an integral part of adjustment in many developing countries, particularly relied upon by countries facing large external imbalances. A devaluation can only reduce trade imbalances if it translates to a real devaluation and if trade flows respond to relative prices in a significant...

The role of the international commodity market in transmitting disturbances is considered in a model that incorporates commodities as an input in production. The analysis employs a three-country framework: a liquidity-constrained commodity supplier and two industrial countries that import the...

In the past two decades, cross country portfolio holdings of a large variety of assets have risen sharply. This has created an important role for changes in asset prices, or valuation effects". This dissertation examines the role of valuation effects in a country's external adjustment. The...

Using a new, large data set on quarterly reserve requirements for the period 1970-2011, this paper provides new evidence on the use of reserve requirements as a countercyclical macroprudential tool in developing countries. The appeal of reserve requirements lies in the pro-cyclical behavior of...

This paper estimates the effect of worldwide tax changes on output following the narrative approach developed for the United States by Romer and Romer (2010). The analysis uses a novel dataset on value-added taxes for 51 countries (21 industrial and 30 developing) for the period 1970-2014 to...