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...

Using subnational historical data, this paper establishes the within country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium. The paper constructs a data set incorporating measures of pre-colonial population density, new measures of present regional per capita...

How deep are the roots of Latin America's economic inequalities? In this chapter we survey both the history and the literature about the region's extreme economic disparities, focusing on the most recent academic contributions. We begin by documenting the broad patterns of national and...

Throughout, the history of the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, natural resource wealth has been critical for its economies. Production of precious metals, sugar, rubber, grains, coffee, copper, and oil have at various periods of history made countries in Latin America-and their...

Climate change is already a reality. This is evidenced by the acceleration of global temperature increases, the melting of ice and snow covers, and rising sea levels. Latin America and the Caribbean region (LCR) are not exempt from these trends, as illustrated by the changes in precipitation...

Based on analysis of recent data on the evolution of global temperatures, snow and ice covers, and sea level rise, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently declared that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal." Global surface temperatures, in particular, have...

Financial crises can happen for a variety of reasons: (a) nobody really understands what is going on (the collective cognition paradigm); (b) some understand better than others and take advantage of their knowledge (the asymmetric information paradigm); (c) everybody understands, but crises are...

This paper analyzes the bright and dark sides of the financial development process through the lenses of the four fundamental frictions to which agents are exposed -- information asymmetry, enforcement, collective action, and collective cognition. Financial development is shaped by the efforts...

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...

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 the...