It is rarely questioned that the European Union can be considered a model for other world regions. Comparable initiatives elsewhere are much less integrated, and up until now less successful, even if like Mercosur they are based on the European model. Although elements of the democratic rule of...

Extreme climate-related events have a direct impact on the welfare of households. The frequency and magnitude of those shocks appear to be closely linked to increasing vulnerability of households and communities in developing countries. Yet, the link between natural disasters and living...

To promote and contribute to the discussion of fiscal federalism in Argentina, this paper presents a proposal to amend the distribution of the revenue from the Income Tax between the Nation and the provinces. The proposal is based on the need to help reinvigorate the discussion on the...

Africa and Latin America secured their independence from European colonial rule a century and half apart: most of Latin America after 1820 and most of Africa after 1960. Despite the distance in time and space, they share important similarities. In each case independence was followed by political...

Empirical evidence shows a growing absolute gap between rich and poor people throughout the world. Such growing income differences are the outcome of significant inequalities of opportunities. In this paper we focus on the opportunities provided (or denied) to access knowledge embedded in new...

Standard international trade models have consistently produced results that, compared ex post with real world data, show the right sign but much smaller magnitudes. Besides, for the case of developing countries, these same models predict that unskilled labour would gain from liberalization, and...

This paper presents the theoretical and operational criteria followed by El Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social (The National Council for Evaluation of the Social Development Policy, Coneval) to define the methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty. The...

Nine versions of Wagner’s law are examined employing annual time-series data on Bolivia for the period 1940-2010. The analysis is an advance over previous work in several ways. First, the stationarity properties and the order of integration of the data are investigated using the Augmented...

This study proposes the idea that Guyana’s present government can be categorized as an elected oligarchy. It highlights the existence of several binding constraints (or structural bottlenecks) and demonstrates how these constraints are exacerbated by the elected oligarchy to impair the...

Did independence push Latin America down a growth-inequality trade-off? During the late colonial decades, the region completed two centuries of growth unmatched anywhere and inequality reached spectacular heights. During the half century after insurgency and independence, inequality fell steeply...