This book is organized as follows: Introduction; by William Easterly and Luis Serven Latin America's Infrastructure in The Era of Macroeconomic Crises; by Cesar Calderon, William Easterly, and Luis Serven The Output Cost of Latin America's Infrastructure Gap; by Cesar Calderon and Luis Serven...

Latin America's macroeconomic crisis of the 1980s and '90s forced a severe fiscal adjustment across the region. More often than not, however, fiscal stability was achieved at the cost of a drastic compression of public infrastructure spending, which in some countries amounted to half or more of...

There is a long-standing literature that shows that fiscal adjustment is often implemented through cuts in public investment, including infrastructure (Roubini and Sachs, 1989; Hicks, 1991; De Haan et al. 1996). In this respect, the present paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution...

When growth-promoting spending is cut so much that the present value of future government revenues falls by more than the immediate improvement in the cash deficit, fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator. Although short-term cash flows matter, too tight a focus on them...

Public investment and infrastructure spending are often singled out for drastic cuts at times of fiscal retrenchment. Fiscal austerity in Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by a sharp contraction in infrastructure spending. In 5 of the 9 major Latin American countries,...