Latin America's economic growth rebound in the 2000s is often attributed to a “commodities boom,” which implies that the region’s growth was stimulated by sizable increases in the price of commodity exports. This paper looks at whether the data support such a conclusion. It finds that...

Will developing countries continue to face an expanding U.S. market for their imports? This report projects that the annual value of U.S. imports, measured in non-dollar currencies, can actually be expected to contract over the next decade -- in contrast to its rapid growth over the last decade.

This report examines data on poverty in Venezuela, and corrects misreporting which claimed that poverty increased during the seven years of the Chavez administration.

¿Ha incrementado la pobreza en Venezuela bajo el mandato del Presidente Hugo Chávez? Este reporte estudia los datos disponibles sobre el tema y corrige información errónea que se ha presentado en varios medios de comunicación.

This report examines the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) projections for economic growth for Argentina and Venezuela in recent years. It shows that the IMF consistently made large errors in overestimating Argentina's GDP growth for the years 2000, 2001 and 2002, during the country's...

This paper looks briefly at the recent inflation experiences of ten Latin American countries: Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Bolivia. The authors construct a core inflation index (excluding food and energy), and look at...

This paper challenges the conclusions of an econometric analysis by Daniel Ortega and Francisco Rodríguez on the effects on literacy of the Misión Robinson program in Venezuela. Their analysis concludes "most of our estimates of program impact represent qualitatively small and rarely...

¿Seguirán incrementando las importaciones a los Estados Unidos? Este informe demuestra que el valor anual de estas importaciones pueden contraer durante la próxima década, a pesar del crecimiento de la década pasada.

With Spain’s official unemployment rate at 26 percent, and the economy projected to contract by 1.3 percent this year, it is difficult to make the case for continued austerity that could push a barely growing economy back into recession. Yet the government is committed to further fiscal...

In the past 6 years the Greek economy has gone through a massive adjustment at a steep price. The economy finally grew in 2014, by 0.6 percent, but the recovery is weak, slow and fragile. This paper argues that prolonged mass unemployment and reduced living standards, brought about by years of...