This paper uses a model of intergenerational accounting to simulate the intergenerational distribution of oil wealth in Venezuela. Venezuelan oil production does not seem to follow an optimal extraction path. Nevertheless, this is true if we do not consider what the government does with the...

How much wealth has accumulated in the region and how is it distributed across households? Despite being widely recognized for its extreme income inequality, reliable data on wealth is scarce, partial and oftentimes contradictory, making it difficult to an swer these ba sic qu estions. In this...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a universal call to action to end poverty and protect the environment. The Government of Guatemala is prioritizing the SDGs it will focus on and defining lines of action to make progress towards achieving them. In this paper, we apply the Integrated...

This paper analyzes reforms and counter-reforms in Bolivia in recent decades and their effects on the policymaking process (PMP) and productivity. Bolivia's PMP has shifted from a formal representative democracy to a "participative and direct type of democracy" where street protest and other...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries' growth would benefit from reductions in barriers to trade. However, the empirical basis for judging trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; policies are poorly measured; and...

This paper investigates the impact of tourism policy on employment, using the Tourism Development Policy (TDP) implemented in the Argentinean province of Salta during the years of 2003 to 2010 as a case study. Following the Synthetic Control Method for comparative case studies, we use a...

As Latin America and the Caribbeans "Great Liberalization" reaches its 30th anniversary, we revisit the trade and growth debate by updating and expanding Estevadeordal and Taylors 2013 paper. To better understand the regions heterogeneity of policies and outcomes, we extend this analysis to...

This paper studies from an empirical and theoretical perspective the systemic and bank-level effects of imposing reserve requirements (RR) in foreign currency in an economy with a heavily dollarized financial system. The paper empirically characterizes banks responses to the RR carried out by...

This paper studies whether changes in the composition of public spending affect the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations. Based on a sample of 44 developing countries and 26 advanced economies during 1980-2019, results show that while fiscal consolidations tend to be on average,...

Latin America is widely acknowledged as one of the most unequal regions of the world (Sánchez-Ancochea 2021). But it is also one of the most democratic, certainly as compared to other developing regions. These two facts seem difficult to reconcile. Both folk theories of democratic...