The Inter-American Development Bank and the OECD Development Centre created the International Forum on Latin American Perspectives as an annual meeting place of ideas and strategies from Latin America and from the OECD region. The tenth meeting of the Forum was held in Paris in November 1999 and...

The literature on the relationship between economic diversification and development has grown rapidly in recent years, partly due to the surprising finding that diversification rises with gross domestic product per capita up to a certain point. Export diversification along the extensive margin...

Summary Business training is a widely used development tool, yet little is known about its impact. We study the effects of such a business training program held in Central America. To deal with endogenous selection into the training program, we use a regression discontinuity design, exploiting...

The literature on the relationship between economic diversification and development established that diversification rises with development up to a point. Some have argued that market failures reduce private investments that are necessary to find out whether a new product can be exported...

"This paper examines the link between sectoral concentration and overall performance in the search for on-the-frontier innovations, inside-the-frontier innovations, and export booms. It extends the literature by increasing country coverage and the types of search processes considered, and by...

"Recent research highlights the relationship between economic development and productive diversification, which may be hindered by market failures. After identifying stages of diversification in disaggregated export data, the authors develop a metric for the flows of export "discoveries," or...

"Klinger and Lederman use disaggregated export data to explore the relationship between economic discovery and economic development. They find that discoveries, or episodes, when countries begin exporting a new product are not limited to so-called 'dynamic' industries. Rather, they also occur in...

In a series of papers we have developed the notion that net foreign assets could be better approximated by capitalizing the net investment income line of the balance of payments statistics. Hidden assets or changes in financial costs may change the net return of net foreign assets even when the...