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 book presents a new framework for analyzing the political economy of budget processes in Latin America that is based on the following premises: i) the budget process must be considered as part of the overall policymaking process rather than in isolation; ii) budget outcomes cannot be fully...

Starting in the 1980s, China’s economic growth has been characterized by a rapid acceleration. Even though the Asian financial crisis caused China’s growth to decelerate somewhat, the very high growth rates that picked up again in 2000 have more than doubled per-capita income and total GDP...

"State capacity is exceptionally low in Latin America, even when compared to other former colonies. This paper analyzes four possible factors that could potentially explain this troubling feature: political inequality, economic inequality, interstate conflict and civil war. With the exception of...

This paper was prepared for the 1998 IDB/IIC Annual Meeting entitled: The Employment in Latin America: What is the Problem and Should it be Addressed? held in Cartagena, Colombia in March 1998. Despite macroeconomic stabilization and structural reforms, employment problems have persisted in...