Neither regional integration nor trade is a welfare or policy objective in itself. If countries are pursuing policies to promote them, this is as a means to improve their welfare. The ultimate objective need not be under a purely economic definition: there is a long history of seeing integration...

Este documento fue comisionado por la Red de Integración y Comercio del Diálogo Regional de Política para la II Reunión Hemisférica celebrada los días 22 y 23 de mayo de 2001. Ni la integración regional ni el comercio son, en sí mismos, objetivos de bienestar o de política económica....

Este documento fue comisionado por la Red de Integración y Comercio del Diálogo Regional de Política para la II Reunión Hemisférica celebrada los días 22 y 23 de mayo de 2001. Ni la integración regional ni el comercio son, en sí mismos, objetivos de bienestar o de política económica....

Neither regional integration nor trade is a welfare or policy objective in itself. If countries are pursuing policies to promote them, this is as a means to improve their welfare. The ultimate objective need not be under a purely economic definition: there is a long history of seeing integration...

This paper discusses the European Union trade policy making process and implications for the Andean community. The European Union (EU) divides its agreements with other countries into three types: neighbourhood, trade and development, and is currently classifying the negotiations with the Andean...

This paper investigates the effects of political (mis)alignment on public service delivery when mandates are shared between state and local governments. We analyze sewage treatment policies in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Relying on difference-in-differences estimations, we establish a...

This paper provides the first experimental evaluation of the participatory budgeting model showing that it increased public participation in the process of public decision making, increased local tax revenues collection, channeled larger fractions of public budgets to services stated as top...

This working paper advances research on inequality with unique, new data on income distribution in 61 countries, including 20 Latin American countries, to explore the effects of political parties on redistribution. First, consistent with a central, but still contested, assumption of the...

In the last decades, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced a dramatic increase in the levels of higher education enrollment. Using administrative data from Chile and Colombia, we find that this phenomenon is not always associated with higher private individual returns. In...

This paper develops a semiotic-inferential model of verbal communication for incomplete information games: a language is seen as a set of conventional signs that point to types, and the credibility of a message depends on the strategic context. Formally, there is an encoding-decoding step where...