As usual in this series, Chapter 1 reviews the configuration of global risks and assesses the outstanding short term opportunities and challenges facing the LAC region. We document the significant slowdown in economic activity across the region, and explore the possibility of this being the...

The stock market globalization process has produced historic changes in the structure of stock markets, the effects of which are evident throughout the world. Despite these transformations, there are relatively few sources examining the connections between the globalization process currently...

This semiannual report examines the short and medium-term challenges for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) as the external factors that were instrumental in the region’s recent performance recede. In particular, we address the role of the exchange rate as a counter-cyclical policy tool to...

This semiannual report — a product of the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean Region of the World Bank — examines the short and medium-term challenges for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) as the external factors that were instrumental in the region’s...

After a robust recovery following the global crisis, Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) has entered into a phase of lower growth dynamics: economic activity in the region is expected to expand by about 3 percent in 2012, after having grown at 4 percent in 2011 and 6 percent in 2010. This...

What were the market and regulatory issues that led to the subprime crisis? How should prudential regulation be fixed? The answers depend on the interpretive lenses - or 'paradigms'- through which one sees finance. The agency paradigm, which has dominated recent regulatory policy and provides...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are important for employment and economic activity; however, they are perceived to lack adequate financing, which hampers their growth. As a consequence, governments have implemented a number of programs to foster SME lending and attention has focused on...

The authors analyze the Washington Consensus, which at its original formulation reflected views not only from Washington, but also from Latin America. Tracing the life of the Consensus from a Latin American perspective in terms of evolving economic development paradigms, they document the...

The global financial crisis brought public guarantees to the forefront of the policy debate. Based on a review of the theoretical foundations of public guarantees, this paper concludes that the commonly used justifications for public guarantees based solely on agency frictions (such as adverse...

This paper proposes some basic elements of a conceptual framework to help organize the thinking about policies that can strengthen the knowledge mission of the World Bank. It first argues that the Bank occupies a unique and prominent subset of the social and economic development "knowledge...