This book explains how economies, institutions, and politics interact to produce budget outcomes in Latin America, a region in which informality dominates public governance. It includes detailed country analyses which provide comparative knowledge about the workings of policymaking and budget...

This publication contains a collection of papers presented within the framework of the Public Policy Management and Transparency Network: Development Effectiveness and Results-Based Budget Management, of the Regional Policy Dialogue and the PRODEV initiative. The paper topics cover four central...

Latin America suffered a profound state crisis in the 1980s, which prompted not only the wave of macroeconomic and deregulation reforms known as the Washington Consensus, but also a wide variety of institutional or 'second generation' reforms. 'The State of State Reform in Latin America' reviews...

This paper considers whether institutional factors, in this instance electoral systems and procedures, affect Latin American countries' fiscal performance as measured by the size of the public sector, fiscal deficits, the size of the public debt, and the degree of procyclality of fiscal policy....

What is the impact of political decentralisation in Latin America? This book considers the problems raised by political decentralisation in the region and identifies the challenges ahead. Political decentralisation tends to devolve a certain amount of financial responsibility to the sub-national...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...

This working paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central, but still contested, assumption of the...

Ecuador's current political economy is largely a product of the boom that took place in the country's oil sector in the early 1970s. The pressure of heightened revenue flows created an oil-exporting factional democracy, and a dichotomy between policies focused on minimizing the pitfalls of...

The Bank expanded its housing finance activities in the 1990s, shifting its support toward sector reforms that increase the capacity of housing finance and delivery mechanisms to cater to the needs of low-income households. The present publication examines Bank experience in housing, draws...

This paper compares the history of tax incentives in seven Latin American countries. It is an attempt to understand why countries enact tax incentive legislation; how countries measure the costs and benefits of such legislation; how such costs and benefits are viewed by the public; and what...