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...

This paper contributes to literature on the process of reform in Latin America. We study political economy aspects and the policy making process of reforms in what we identify as the five critical steps through the "life cycle" of a policy reform: the Planning, Dialogue, Adoption,...

This paper joins the debate on the size of the middle class in Latin America, analysing its structure and characteristics. The paper investigates inter-class mobility potential and its evolution over time in the case of selected countries. As a result of the estimations, we find that Latin...

One of the particular features of poor countries’ economies is their volatility, due mostly to their dependence on commodities. The paper shows that this volatility is a prime factor behind the debt crises of the poorest countries. It advocates the adoption by donors of a new lending...

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...

The report argues that aid volatility is an important source of volatility for the poorest countries. Following a method already applied by the Agence Française de Développement, the report argues that loans to LICs should incorporate a floating grace period, which the country could draw upon...

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,...