Over the years, the East-West Center (EWC) has developed considerable expertise in refinery modeling, especially in the area of forecasting product balances for countries, given planned capacity changes, changes in product demand, changes in crude slates, and changes in product specifications....

Since the mid-1990s, the two regional trade agreements in South America, the southern Mercosur Pact (among Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay), and the northern Andean Pact (among Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru) noticeably affected certain trade patterns between the two...

This paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs and self-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately at the markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature of the latter....

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask whether those individuals who start in the best economic position are those who experience the largest earnings gains or the...

There is anecdotal evidence that the standard of living for the educated has fallen in Venezuela over the last few years. This evidence comes as a surprise because after experiencing an economic downturn in 2002 and 2003, Venezuela's economy has boomed (gross domestic product growth has hovered...

This paper studies the causal factors that make the oil-state Venezuela, which is generally characterized by a low level of violence, an outlier among the oil countries as a whole. It applies a newly elaborated 'context approach' that systematically considers domestic and international...

Natural resources are often held responsible for intrastate conflicts. As a consequence, both national and international measures to avoid the detrimental impact of resource endowments have increasingly been discussed and implemented in resource-rich countries. These measures include...

This paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs and self-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately at the markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature of the latter....

During the last decade, the Venezuelan government has pursued a reform of the legal regime of hydrocarbons tailored to its interests as an oil producing country. However, the ongoing consequences of the global economic recession which negatively impacted the Venezuelan economy, call into...

Econometric Modeling has a wide range if applications, including economy-wide representations. This study takes on the task of finding a suitable structure to model the Venezuelan economy. It is revealed that econometric structural and computable general equilibrium models are inapplicable,...