Recent studies on the welfare implications of internationally mobile capital for a country employing commercial policy have been restricted to constant-returns-to-scale (CRS) production models. It is generally concluded that the pursuit of such policies is welfare-decreasing under CRS...

How should the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) respond to the challenges of the new century? As recently as the early 1990s, governments and policymakers in Latin America and the Caribbean relied on the IDB and other multilateral institutions not only as important sources of finance but...

This paper argues that there were two key factors behind the resilience of Latin American financial systems during the crisis. The first was the initial conditions that a number of countries in the region faced during the pre-crisis years. Sound macroeconomic policies and highly improved...

Emerging market economies have undergone an extraordinary period of turbulence in capital markets during the period 1997–2002, and volatility remains a salient feature of the financial landscape.This paper discusses a number of central issues for the future of the region's financial markets....

The implications of a large public debt for the implementation of capital controls for an economy where tax revenue collection is costly are examined. Conditions are analyzed under which policymakers will resort to capital controls to reduce the cost of recycling domestic public debt. The...

The relationship between the degree of wage indexation chosen by private agents and the degree of public debt indexation chosen by the government is examined. It is shown that the government is likely to increase public debt indexation in response to an increase in wage indexation. By contrast,...

Since the 1970s, a number of high-inflation Latin American countries have experienced persistent "dollarization." To interpret some of the stylized facts, a simple model is presented in which dollarization reflects the costs that are involved in switching the currency denomination of...

The role of debt maturity in managing the government's incentives to use opportunistic inflation to reduce the ex post real value of its nominal liabilities is explored. The maturity structure of government debt is shown to be a powerful instrument for affecting the time profile of the inflation...