This paper surveys four Argentinean industries - light ships, television programs, wines, and wooden furniture - that have experienced substantial export growth in recent years, particularly to developed countries. The case studies first describe the structure of the industries, then...

This paper uses simple regression techniques to make an initial assessment of the monetary damages caused by the January 12, 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti. Damages are estimated for a disaster with both 200,000 and 250,000 total dead and missing (i.e., the range of mortality that the...

The available evidence on the effects of aid on growth is notoriously mixed. We use a novel empirical methodology, a heterogeneous panel vector-autoregression model identified through factor analysis, to study the dynamic response of exports, imports, and per capita GDP growth to a global aid...

Este documento analiza la importancia de la integración financiera en Centro América, enfatizando los efectos de la actual crisis internacional sobre los sistemas financieros de la subregión. Después de presentar evidencia sobre la integración financiera en Centro América y la compara con...

This paper surveys and analyzes industrial policies in Colombia, finding extensive use of productive development policies (PDPs) and despite claims of only moderate government intervention. Rarely explicitly associated with the need to address market failures, PDPs are instead associated with...

This paper explores the impact of international financial integration on credit markets in Latin America, using a cross-country dataset covering 17 countries between 1996 and 2008. It is found that financial integration amplifies the impact of international financial shocks on aggregate credit...

This project examines fiscal reforms in Brazil since the 1990s, particularly in taxation, budgeting, and fiscal federalism. While recentralizing fiscal authority and massively expanding the extractive capacity of the state, policymakers chose not to revamp an inefficient tax system that has...

This paper addresses the relationships between innovation, research and development (R&D) and productivity in domestic ICT firms in Costa Rica. Factors considered were the types of innovation outputs produced by domestic ICT firms, the relative importance of innovation inputs, the impacts of...

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 assesses the extent to which a country's external capital structure can aid in mitigating the macroeconomic impact of oil price shocks. Two Caribbean economies highly vulnerable to oil price shocks are considered: an oil importer (Jamaica) and an oil exporter (Trinidad and Tobago)....