Crime and violence generate many distortions in the allocation of private and public resources and engender economic and social costs that hinder development. In Latin America and the Caribbean, which is the most violent region on earth, the costs of crime represent at least 3.5% of the regional...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the foundations of the economy and provoked devastating social effects in all the countries in the world, being Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) one of the most affected regions. This report updates the regional overview of the response measures...

The article follows concepts from the field of International Political Economy (IPE). Its objective is to analyze the evolution of economic relations between China and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), especially in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or New Silk...

The present article analyzes the recent expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The study is justified by the noticeable increase and diversification of economic relations between the region and China in recent years. The advance of the BRI in...

This study shows that the trend of declining gender gaps in labor market indicators in Latin America in previous decades did not change significantly in most countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, a closer look at the dynamics during the 2019-2021 period shows that (i) women were...

This paper introduces a dataset that gathers information on whether and how Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have complied with or deviated from implemented fiscal rules. It provides annual data on fiscal rules for 14 LAC countries from 2000 to 2020, and it considers the design features of...

External capital accounts suffered during the COVID-19 crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean, but perhaps surprisingly the impacts were less severe than in previous crises. Gross capital inflows offset the outflows of residents, in sharp contrast to the global financial crisis of 2008/09...

This paper investigates the impact of price and real exchange rate volatility on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows in a panel of 10 Latin American and Caribbean countries, observed between 1990 and 2012. Both price and exchange rate volatility series are estimated through the Generalized...

This paper provides a synthesis of the four papers on the Latin American and Caribbean economies: Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. It focuses on the following themes: macroeconomic stabilization and fiscal challenges, poverty and inequality, and the use of natural resources...

This study estimates Climate Adjusted Total Factor Productivity (CATFP) for agriculture in Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries, while also providing comparisons with several regions of the world. Climatic variability is introduced in Stochastic Production Frontier (SPF) models by...