The American welfare state is evolving away from the model initiated during the New Deal and elaborated during the civil rights era. It increasingly aims at capacitation rather than income maintenance, and its interventions more frequently take the form of services as opposed to monetary grants....

Rapidly innovating industries are just not behaving the way theory expected. Conventional industrial organization theory predicts that when parties in the supply chain have to make transaction-specific investments, the risk of opportunism will drive them away from contracts and toward vertical...

It is a brute fact of contemporary globalization - unmistakable as activists and journalists catalog scandal after scandal - that the very transformations making possible higher quality, cheaper products often lead to unacceptable conditions of work: brutal use of child labor, dangerous...

This note starts from the premise that policy makers invariably make mistakes, both intentional and unintentional. That requires shifting the focus from one-time choice of winners (sectors, industries, firms, and other organizations) to the process of error detection and error correction of the...

This essay explores the governance mechanisms by which an industrial policy based on Toyota Production System (TPS) principles can learn from, collaborate with and ultimately help transform the context of the economic actors without being captured by them. This working paper was prepared for the...

"La era de la productividad" describe de qué manera la baja productividad de América Latina y el Caribe impide que la región se ponga a la par de los países del mundo desarrollado. Los autores indagan más allá de las explicaciones macroeconómicas tradicionales y profundizan hasta llegar...

The authors, specialists in development, argue that what they call dirigismeâan a priori set of requirements for economic developmentâhas led to the preeminence of the strong and the exclusion of the weak. They advocate a learning-centered approach to development, which in turn emphasizes the...

Export Pioneers in Latin America analyzes a series of case studies of successful new export activities throughout the region to learn how pioneers jump-start a virtuous process leading to economic transformation. The cases of blueberries in Argentina, avocados in Mexico, and aircraft in Brazil...