Structural Reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1970-2000 : Indexes and Methodological Notes

This paper updates ECLAC's indexes of structural reform in five areas: trade reform, financial liberalization, tax reform, liberalization of external capital transactions and privatization. 17 Latin American countries are covered for the period 1970-2000. The resulting indexes facilitate comparisons across countries over time. Using an extended reform index series should allow sufficient degrees of freedom to investigate econometrically the separate effect of structural and macroeconomic reforms in Latin America and avoid the methodological problems linked to the use of indirect proxy variables. This paper complements and updates the times series originally published and documented in Morley, Machado and Pettinato (1999) Indexes of structural reform in Latin America