Over the past decade we have witnessed a double convergence. Aid donors have developed a growing interest in the private sector while private banks have set about creating corporate social responsibility programs, sustainable lending and microfinance programmes. As a consequence, the dialogue...

Strong growth in China and India has led to improvements in raw-material exporting countries' terms of trade and attracted complementary finance. The long-term challenge for these countries, where institutions are often fragile, is to avoid the so-called “resource curse”. This paper aims to...

In this paper we test the impact of elections on fiscal policy in Latin American economies in comparison to OECD countries over the period 1990-2006. We find that in Latin American countries, the average primary balance declines by an amount close to 0.7 per cent of GDP during an election year,...

This paper presents development accounting exercises in Latin America using novel databases and methods to investigate the robustness of its results. While total factor productivity initially appears to be the most important driver of output per worker gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean,...

This paper looks at the incidence of fiscal policy on the income distribution for Chile and Mexico. Notably by broadening the income concept to account for in-kind benefits and taxes, this paper provides a full picture of the effect of fiscal policy on reducing income inequality. The contrast...

This paper studies the renegotiations of road concessions in Chile, Colombia and Peru for the period 1993-2010. First, it analyses the legal framework, the institutional design and the types of concessions of these countries and second, it uses a novel data composed of a sample of 61 of the 62...