Interest in access to finance has increased significantly in recent years, as growing evidence suggests that lack of access to credit prevents lower-income households and small firms from financing high return investment projects, having an adverse effect on growth and poverty alleviation. This...

Over the past decades, many countries have implemented significant reforms to foster domestic capital market development. These reforms included stock market liberalization, privatization programs, and the establishment of regulatory and supervisory frameworks. Despite the intense reform...

Over the past decades, many countries have implemented significant reforms to foster capital market development. Latin American countries were at the forefront of this process. The authors analyze where Latin American capital markets stand after these reforms. They find that despite the intense...

This paper argues that the dominant policy paradigm on financial development is increasingly insufficient to address big emerging issues that are particularly relevant for financial systems in Latin America. This paradigm was shaped over the past decades by a fundamental shift in thinking toward...

A widely shared view holds that there is no policy-exploitable causal connection from saving to growth because domestic saving is fully endogenous, optimally determined, or substitutable by foreign saving. Yet, abandoning these assumptions, which are questionable in the real world of frictions,...

This paper discusses the theoretical arguments in favor of and against economic globalization and, with a view to ascertaining whether Latin America may be able to capture the globalization upside, examines the trends and salient features of Latin America's globalization as compared with that of...

The Subprime crisis largely resulted from failures to internalize systemic risk evenly across financial intermediaries and recognize the implications of Knightian uncertainty and mood swings. A successful reform of prudential regulation will need to integrate more harmoniously the three...

Access to financial services, or rather the lack thereof, is often indiscriminately decried as a problem in many developing countries. The authors argue that the problem of access should rather be analyzed by identifying different demand and supply constraints. They use the concept of an access...

This paper reviews the determinants of Latin America's uneven growth based on an accounting decomposition that breaks down countries' growth (relative to the world) into three trade-related channels: (i) an export pull measuring the traction exerted by the country's exports, (ii) an external...

This paper proposes some basic elements of a conceptual framework to help organize the thinking about policies that can strengthen the knowledge mission of the World Bank. It first argues that the Bank occupies a unique and prominent subset of the social and economic development "knowledge...