Why are growth rates in Latin America so disappointing? This book reviews the results of an ambitious research project to determine the binding constraints to growth, that is, the barrier whose removal would yield the greatest benefit in terms of growth. Included are case studies from seven...

La estructura y selección de temas de la presente publicación responde, en su mayor parte, a un diagnóstico de crecimiento para Guatemala realizado en 2007, donde se identificaron un conjunto de factores que afectan las posibilidades de desarrollo del país. A lo largo de estas páginas hay...

El mundo de la agricultura para Centroamérica y la República Dominicana está cambiando radicalmente y ello se ha convertido en motivo de atención para los encargados de las políticas públicas. Entre los nuevos retos se encuentran el reciente acuerdo comercial RD-CAFTA concertado con...

This paper reviews productive development policies (PDPs) in Guatemala, focusing on the alleged justification of existing programs in terms of the market or government failures they are meant to address. An effort is made to identify how the different instruments complement or contradict each...

En años recientes la participación de las microfinanzas en los sistemas financieros formales de América Latina y el Caribe se ha incrementado notablemente. En la actualidad existe una marcada ausencia de análisis cuantitativos del nivel de riesgo y retorno que enfrentan las instituciones de...

In Guatemala there are substantial and growing imbalances in the housing market; at the same time, financial markets remain shallow and underdeveloped. The analytical framework applied in this paper starts by identifying the types of market failures responsible for the underdevelopment of the...

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...