Biographical note: MallonRichard D.: Richard D. Mallon is a Fellow Emeritus of the Harvard Institute for International Development. He has provided macroeconomic policy and planning advice in fifteen countries.

Despite considerable progress made by Latin America's biggest economies in putting their finances in order, numerous challenges remain.  Public spending needs to incorporate more flexibility, ageing populations and social demands threaten future pressures on expenditure, and social and...

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) co-operate in competition law and policy to promote increased economic growth, employment and economic efficiency, and a higher average standard of living in the medium to long term....

In the last few years, South America has emerged as one of the most attractive regions for investment in natural gas exploration and production, pipelines, LNG facilities and gas-fired power generation. The continent boasts abundant and growing natural gas reserves

The development of the tradeable sector is a permanent concern for policy makers in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. The weak performance of the tradeable sector has been cited as one of the causes of mixed growth performance in South America during the 1990s as crises in the region have been...

The Central Banks use diffusion indexes (DIs) to synthesize information from proprietary surveys that complement official statistics generating real-time proxies of the economically relevant variables. According to the evidence, the DIs closely follow the economic cycle reflected in those...