New empirical evidence suggests that high levels of income inequality constrain rather than encourage growth. While some explanations involve relationships between inequality and political systems, this paper focuses on the microeconomic behavior of poor households. When returns to labor are...

This paper studies the experience of Latin America (LATAM) with financial liberalisation in the 1990s. The rush towards financial liberalisations in the early 1990s was associated with expectations that external financing would alleviate the scarcity of saving in LATAM, thereby increasing...

Note: The following is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract. Following the study of Feldstein and Horioka in 1980, economists have been studying the relationship between saving and investment with renewed vigor. Most of the recent studies have studied the relationship in the...

This paper studies the experience of Latin-America [LATAM] with inancial liberalization in the 1990s. The rush towards financial liberalizations in the early 1990s was associated with expectations that external financing would alleviate the scarcity of saving in LATAM, thereby increasing...

East Asia and Latin America have diverged in several dimensions in the past three decades. This paper compares household saving behavior in two countries in each region (Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Taiwan). We make four contributions. First, we provide the first comparisons of savings in these...

The unemployment protection systems that exist in most Latin American economies are generally considered inadequate in terms of providing insurance to workers. They may also encourage stratified labor markets and impose barriers to the employee's mobility and the firm's adjustment to changing...