The wrongly called free trade between the first economic Power in the world and a backword country as Colombia, based on the experience of the Free Trade Agreement (TLC) between Mexico and USA, is shown, in practice, as assuring structural disequilibrium for Colombian economy and society....

In the Caribbean Basin countries as in many other parts of the world, unemployment has become since the early 1980s one of the major dimensions of economic dysfunctions affecting societies. With levels that are above 15% and often reaching values of up to 20% or 30% during the decades 1980, 1990...

This study provides a set of tools to analyze the monetary and exchange rate policy issues in the seven countries of the Inter-American Development Bank’s Caribbean region (The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago). It then applies some of them to the...

Innovation has been recognised as a distinctive input to wealth creation through the stimulation of new ideas, processes and products. A nation's economic prosperity has been attributed to the concerted efforts in research and development, technology transfer and collaboration among firms,...

We employ World Bank Enterprise Survey data collected in 2006–2010 for 21,852 firms from 31 Latin American and Caribbean countries to investigate determinants of the adoption of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification, the relation between ISO certification and firm...

Innovation has been recognised as a distinctive input to wealth creation through the stimulation of new ideas, processes and products. A nation's economic prosperity has been attributed to the concerted efforts in research and development, technology transfer and collaboration among firms,...

High government debts, weak economic growth, vulnerability to external shocks and the design of sound fiscal consolidation strategies are among the most critical issues that some of the Caribbean countries have currently to deal with. Stabilization programs may harm economic growth but, under...

This paper contributes to the analysis of the Caribbean's growth performance by setting out a framework for benchmarking indicators of key micro drivers and related structural policies that help explain differentials in productivity and real GDP per capita across the region, and relative to...