After the Quebec Presidential Summit of The Americas Meeting, countries like Colombia will have to reshape its political structure to meet Hemispheric requirements. We will have to encourage universal education, preserve democracy, deepen economic integration and eradicate poverty. This is a...

We test for the populist view of inflation in Latin America between 1970 and 2007. The empirical results - based on the relatively novel panel time-series data and analysis - confirm the theoretical prediction that recently elected governments coming into power after periods of political...

We empirically investigate the hypothesis that when democracies are young, or still fragile and unconsolidated, the size of government (in terms of consumption, debt and share to GDP) tends to increase in an attempt to buy out the electorate, so that democracy becomes acceptable and ?the only...

The post-war experience of developing countries leads to two depressing conclusions: only a small number of countries have successfully developed; and development theory has not produced development. In this article we examine one critical fact that might provide insights into the development...

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...

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...

We investigate in this paper the hypothesis that when democracies are young, or still fragile and unconsolidated, the size of government tends to increase, predictably in an attempt of redistribution, or to buy out the electorate, so that democracy becomes acceptable and "the only game in town"....

We investigate in this paper what are the main determinants of government and external debt in South America. Our sample purposely includes all nine South American countries that re-democratised in the last thirty years or so, and the data cover the period 1970-2007. The results, based on...

This paper develops a game to study the possibility of co-operative behaviour in a situation where the political system is dominated by two strong, opportunistic parties competing in an economy highly dependent on the export of a commodity. Since a binding agreement as an external solution is...