Crime has tangible economic costs. It also has less understood and likely sizable intangible costs. In particular, widespread crime has the potential to weaken trust between citizens and institutions, undermine government reform efforts, and become an obstacle to development. Yet, the impact of...

Trust links citizens to the institutions intended to represent them and to one another. By reducing trust, crime has the potential to grind down social capital and become an obstacle to development. This paper analyzes the relationship between individual victimization and trust in Latin America...

Against the background of Mexico's persistently high degree of inequality, this paper analyzes the country's experience with pro-poor policies over the last decade. A number of important government initiatives, implemented since the mid-1990s, have aimed at improving distributional equity...

Public enterprises may play an important role in government finances and pose substantial fiscal risks. However, these risks are not always adequately reflected in the fiscal accounts. This hampers the transparent assessment of the fiscal stance, provides incentives to move fiscal activities off...

In recent years, many countries have adopted Fiscal Responsibility Laws to strengthen fiscal institutions and promote fiscal discipline in a credible, predictable and transparent manner. Still, results on the effectiveness of these laws remain tentative. In this paper, we test empirically...

Este sumário executivo apresenta a tributação como instrumento de desenvolvimento e não apenas uma simples fonte de receita. Aborda também algumas das áreas problemáticas nos sistemas tributários, tais como evasão, estruturas impositivas regressivas, e a incapacidade de usar os impostos...

This executive summary presents the argument for using taxation as a development tool rather than simply a source of revenue. It also touches on some of the problem areas in tax systems including evasion, regressive personal income tax structures, and the failure to use taxes to improve...

El registro de nacimiento es un derecho fundamental y constituye una prueba legal de la existencia de un individuo y su nacionalidad. Sin la adecuada documentación sobre su identidad, una persona puede ser condenada a una vida de exclusión. En América Latina y el Caribe, 9% de los niños de 0...

The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are on the verge of a paradigm shift. Just a few short years ago, the region's name was blemished by its associations with "the debt crisis," "volatility," and "fiscal adjustment." Yet, in the present day, many of the region's countries have...

Using urban household surveys, we constructed a panel dataset to study the effects of the Argentine macroeconomic crisis of 1999-2002 with the aim of (1) identifying the most vulnerable households, (2) investigating whether employment in the public sector and government spending served to...