The subject of labor unions in Latin America provokes a variety of diverse and strongly held views. While some see unions as a way to protect workers' rights and ensure an equitable distribution of income, others see unions as a drain of productivity or an intrusion of politics into the...

The subject of labor unions in Latin America provokes a variety of diverse and strongly held views. While some see unions as a way to protect workers' rights and ensure an equitable distribution of income, others see unions as a drain of productivity or an intrusion of politics into the...

Following the research strategy put in practice in the project behind Stein et al. (2008), Policymaking in Latin America: How Politics Shapes Policies, this project will be a collective and interactive process among various country teams and the coordinators. We will build a number of country...

The literature has identified that countries with higher levels of openness tend to present a larger government sector as a way to reduce the risks to the economy that openness entails. This paper argues that there are a number of policies that can mitigate trade-induced risks, many of which do...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...

This paper introduces preliminary evidence from a cross-country database of policy characteristics and potential uses of that database. While most databases have emphasized either the content of policies (e.g., size of government deficits) or countries’ formal institutions (e.g., political...