This article challenges recent findings that democracy has sizable effects on economic growth. As extensive political science research indicates that economic turmoil is responsible for causing or facilitating many democratic transitions, the paper focuses on this endogeneity concern. Using a...

This paper revisits the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth by addressing the endogeneity issue stemming from reverse causality and unobserved factors that has plagued previous extensive literature on this subject. In our approach, we use the Geographic Fragmentation...

We conducted two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the impact of government-guaranteed loans offered by the Chilean and Colombian governments. The public funds of these programs greatly expanded following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and offered loans to Micro, Small and...

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...

While Mexico has potential to grow rapidly, its economic growth has remained low for the past three decades. There is no consensus on the country's development path or on how to achieve specific goals. Since the policy debate remains ideological and lacks pragmatism, productive development...

This paper examines how the main characteristics of Argentina's policymaking process (PMP) affect the productivity of its economy using the conceptual framework presented in Murillo, Scartascini and Tommasi (2008), Stein et al. (2008), Spiller and Tommasi (2007), and IDB (2005). First, the paper...

This paper describes private actors' involvement in Colombia's policymaking process. While more transparent and formal channels are used to discuss horizontal policies, they are also less effective. The adoption of targeted policies, however, follows a faster track and depends more on political...

In contrast to the limited impact of aggregate-level productive development policies (PDPs) in Argentina, micro-level PDPs in several sectors have proven highly successful. This study seeks to understand how these PDPs succeeded in a challenging environment, what kinds of mechanisms were...

Este documento analiza las Políticas de Desarrollo Productivos en cinco estudios de caso: i) la promoción de los servicios de exportación; ii) la promoción de las exportaciones de bienes; iii) la promoción de zonas libres; iv) el crédito subsidiado a las viviendas populares; y v) el...

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...