The OECD labor market has undergone major changes over the past two decades. The most evident of these changes is the rise in the number of job-seekers. In 1997, there were more than 35 million people unemployed in the OECD area as a whole, some 6 million more than in the mid-1980s and almost 25...

This paper estimates the effects of equipment investment on relative wages and employment of skilled labor and explores their dynamics. The basic hypothesis is that they are positive, due to either equipment-skill complementarity or to skill advantage in technology adoption. Using a panel data...

New empirical evidence suggests that high levels of income inequality constrain rather than encourage growth. While some explanations involve relationships between inequality and political systems, this paper focuses on the microeconomic behavior of poor households. When returns to labor are...

Latin America is volatile--about two to three times as volatile as the industrial economies. It is more volatile than any region other than Africa and the Middle East. Latin America`s access to international financial markets is sporadic, and often disappears just when it would be most valuable

There are two similarities between the utility privatization programs of the UK and Latin America. Privatization has largely consisted of the transfer of industry-dominant, state companies into the private sector, often with statutory monopoly powers. In addition, the extensive use of price cap...

This article, which serves as an introduction to a group of studies prepared by the IDB Office of the Chief Economist, presents the perceptions of Latin American citizens and employers concerning the employment problem. It compares them to the conditions in the labor markets of the region

This paper discusses the range of factors that can stimulate the further development of the domestic institutional sector through pension system reform measures. The development of the institutional sector in emerging market economies is compared with the experiences of OECD countries. The focus...

This paper examines how the combination of indebtedness and exogenous shocks induce volatility for the countries of Latin America. A techique for simulating the impact of shocks on the costs of external indebtedness and the response of fiscal policies in adjustment to such shocks is presented...

This paper examines the determinants of illegal immigration in the United States from Mexico from 1976 to 1995. The main challenge in the empirical work is that the observations are not the number of individuals that attempt to enter the United States illegally, but rather the number of...

The objective of this work is to assess the changes in poverty and inequality that have taken place in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1970 to 1995, with special emphasis on the 1990s. The main distinctive characteristic of the study is that rather than focusing on individual country...