In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge one element has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity. This paper suggests approaching the history of development thinking by traveling with the GDP through this...

Tax policy is among the most common and relevant instruments in the toolkit of policy-makers when thinking about promoting growth, yet there is not compelling evidence regarding its effect in Latin American countries. Using a variety of approaches, we estimate the effects on growth of the most...

Our research examines the relationship between economic regulatory quality and GDP per capita. We use panel data from 18 South American and Caribbean countries, between 2000 and 2015 using GMM panel estimation. The results reveal a non-linear U-shaped relationship between economic regulatory...

Living in a democratic society has been internationally recognized as a basic human right. While most of the literature tries to identify the effect of democracy on economic prosperity, little work has been done to understand the determinants of economic growth under democracy. This paper...

This study examines the repercussions of the 1979 Sandinista revolution on Nicaragua's economic growth trajectory. Drawing on the synthetic control method, it constructs an artificial counterpart to Nicaragua with the primary objective of estimating the counterfactual gross domestic product...

I examine the contribution of institutional breakdowns to long-run development, drawing on Argentina’s unique departure from a rich country on the eve of World War I to an underdeveloped one today. The empirical strategy is based on building a counterfactual scenario to examine the path of...

This article measures Nueva Granada's GDP before its Independence, analyzes its economic growth during 1785-1810 and considers some hypothesis about its continuity in the 19th century, with an ending reference point in 1905. These measures are used to make international comparisons with other...

The future looked bright for Argentina in the early twentieth century. It had already achieved high levels of income per capita and was moving away from authoritarian government towards a more open democracy. Unfortunately, Argentina never finished the transition. The turning point occurred in...

Institutions and their quality are central concepts in the recent development and institutional economics literatures. Our hypothesis is that inadequate contract enforcement has hindered investment and, in consequence, indirectly has had a negative effect on Uruguay's long-term growth...

In 1979, when anthropometric history was still in its infancy, Robert Fogel and collaborators reported that the height of the US male white population began to decline quite unexpectedly around the birth cohorts of 1830. This was quite a conundrum on account of the fact that according to...