The paper analyzes exchange rate regimes implemented by the major Latin American countries since the Second World War, with special attention on the period of the second globalization process beginning in the 1970s. The analysis follows a historical narrative aiming to provide an understanding...

How deep are the roots of Latin America's economic inequalities? In this chapter we survey both the history and the literature about the region's extreme economic disparities, focusing on the most recent academic contributions. We begin by documenting the broad patterns of national and...

We study the link between central bank independence and inflation by providing narrative and empiricial evidence based on Latin America’s experience over the past 100 years. We present a novel historical dataset of central bank independence for 17 Latin American countries and recount the rocky...

Lauchlin Currie and Albert O. Hirschman worked together as advisers to the National Planning Council in Colombia in the 1950's. Both had little experience in development economics when they arrived, and did not see eye to eye about the functioning and policy recommendations of the Council....

We describe Peru's experience of chronic inflation through the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the need for inflationary taxation in a regime of fiscal dominance of monetary policy. Hyperinflation occurred when further debt accumulation became unavailable, and a populist administration engaged in...

This paper evaluates the alternation between catching up periods and falling behind periods in Brazilian economic history, with data from 1870 to 2016. This alternation expresses the middle income trap. A tentative theoretical framework is presented, suggesting a two-dimensional process, with...

This paper examines the potential impact of institutional shocks on long-term development of property rights and on institutions regulating contracting. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the external institutional shocks might have an uncontemplated side-effect on the institutional development...

This publication brings together two reference works by Angus Maddison: The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, first published in 2001 and The World Economy: Historical Statistics, published in 2003. This new edition contains Statlinks, a service providing access to the underlying data in...