This paper seeks to identify the most promising fiscal strategy to boost long-term economic growth in Argentina and quantify its effects. To this end, the authors updated a growth-diagnostics study for Argentina and corroborated that low appropriability of social returns and insufficient public...

This paper assesses the likelihood of meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015 in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. We simulate the poverty impact of changes in growth rates and redistributive policies, and trace the poverty consequences of various alternative...

Argentina's modern economic history offers perhaps the clearest evidence in support of a rules-based fiscal and monetary policy framework. From 1899 until 1914 the country abided by the rules of the gold standard and experienced rapid GDP growth with price stability. After WWI and until 1939,...

In the 1970s and early 1980s Paul Samuelson reformulated the conditional prediction made by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by replacing socialism with populism. According to Samuelson, "populist democracy" had attained its fullest development in the Southern Cone. He...

The 'paradox of progress' is an empirical regularity that associates more education with larger income inequality. Two driving and competing factors behind this phenomenon are the convexity of the 'Mincer equation' (that links wages and education) and the heterogeneity in its returns, as...

Argentina adopted currency type board arrangements to put an end to monetary instability in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries under very different historical circumstances and contexts with very different results. The first currency board functioned within an international system that...

Argentina adopted currency type board arrangements to put an end to monetary instability in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries under very different historical circumstances and contexts with very different results. The first currency board functioned within an international system that...

The paper sheds light on the apparent success of dollarization in Ecuador. The experience of Argentina with convertibility is used to anchor the analysis. Two key factors are seen to play the most important role: first, the behavior of the real exchange rate and second, the source of external...

International narratives on Argentina's recovery from the crisis of 2001-02 tend to emphasize the role of rising commodity prices and growing demand from China. Argentina is said to have been 'lucky', saved by global demand for its agricultural exports. The international narrative has also been...

This is an update and revision of our 2009 study. Using a broad dataset and an original methodology, this paper reports composite development gaps across economic, social and institutional sectors. We define development gap as the distance between the observed and the expected development level...