The aim of this article is to point out the importance of education on a sustained economic development strategy, having into account inter-sector relations and the influence of education in the growth of production per head. Three cross-country models are presented to analyze the evolution of...

The present paper studies the interaction between short-run fluctuations and economic growth by presenting empirical evidence of the impact of business cycle fluctuations on the rate of growth consistent with a constant unemployment rate in 13 Latin American and 18 OECD countries during the...

Manufacturing. Energy. Agriculture. In 1900, these were the industries of a still-young nation establishing itself as an emerging world power. Today, a century of accumulated innovation is creating new pathways of industrial advancement that would have been impossible to imagine a century ago....

Latin America has been strongly affected by the international crisis and recession since late 2008. In comparison to historical experience, how has Latin America coped with the global crisis, which has been the role of different transmission mechanisms, and how have the region's structural and...

In the past 30 years Costa Rica has grown steadily and social indicators have improved markedly. Well-being indicators are comparable or even above the OECD average in several dimensions, such as health, environment or life-satisfaction. This paper reviews the social progress that Costa Rica has...

There is scant empirical economic research regarding the way that Latin American governments efficiently allocate their spending across different functions to achieve higher growth. While most papers restrict their analysis to the size of government, much less is known about the composition of...

This is a policy paper which examines the development challenges of the Caribbean island of Barbados against the backdrop of the government's decision to enter into a structural adjustment agreement with the International Monetary Fund in 2018. The paper gives an overview of Barbados' trajectory...

How do the number of trade partners and the concentration of trade among partners affect the economic growth of a country? We refer to these characteristics as the structure of trade, and explore this question empirically in this study. We find that the structure of trade, independently of the...

The rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the communist empire was one of the distinguishing events of the twentieth century. The 21 countries that made up the Warsaw Pact simultaneously made a transition from Communism to more market-based economic systems. These countries all shared a common...

Most small island economies or "microstates" have distinctly different characteristics from larger developing economies. They are more open and vulnerable to external and environmental shocks, resulting in high output volatility. Most of them also suffer from locational disadvantages. Although a...