Resumen En el presente trabajo se muestra que el Sistema Nacional de Planificación de 1958 fue el resultado de un proceso que se inició con el ascenso al poder de Eleazar López Contreras en 1936. Así, durante su gobierno, concurrieron acciones ejecutadas por el Estado que teóricamente han...

We compute Public Sector Performance (PSP) and Public Sector Efficiency (PSE) indicators and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) efficiency scores for a sample of twenty-three Latin American and Caribbean Countries (LAC) to measure efficiency of public spending for the period 2001-2010. Our results...

La reducción de la pobreza, que afecta a más de un tercio de la población en América Latina y el Caribe, es un objetivo prioritario de las políticas públicas. A partir de un breve diagnóstico de la pobreza, este artículo discute los elementos de una estrategia integral para reducirla,...

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 report looks at Argentina’s current debt, fiscal, and overall economic situation to see if there is justification for concerns that Argentina is facing serious economic problems that could lead to a default on its sovereign debt. The Argentine economy has grown more than 60 percent since...

It has become common sense to argue that the reforms of social policies after the 1988 Constitution were somehow instrumental in explaining social progress, and that Lula’s policies mark a break with the 1988 Constitution. We suggest that both propositions are misleading. We argue that the...

Living in a democratic society has been internationally recognized as a basic human right. While most of the literature tries to identify the effect of democracy on economic prosperity, little work has been done to understand the determinants of economic growth under democracy. This paper...

Historically, many countries have suffered a pattern of procyclical fiscal policy: spending too much in booms and then forced to cut back in recessions. This problem has especially plagued Latin American commodity exporters. Since 2000, fiscal policy in Chile has been governed by a structural...

American fiscal policy has been procyclical: Washington wasted the expansion period 2001-2007 by running budget deficits, but by 2011 had come to feel constrained by inherited debt to withdraw fiscal stimulus. Chile has achieved countercyclical fiscal policy - saving in booms and easing in...