Knowledge of causal relationships is fundamental for understanding the dynamic mechanisms of ecological systems. To detect such relationships from multivariate time series, Granger causality, an idea first developed in econometrics, has been formulated in terms of vector autoregressive (VAR)...

This paper examines the determinants of social spending in Latin America during the period 1990–2012 and how they differed between the years of the Washington Consensus (1990–2000) and the period that followed (2001–2012). Special attention is also paid to the evaluation of convergence...