This paper analyzes the factors that explain earnings in levels and inequality in the urban areas of Bolivia, considering not only the usual individual characteristics (education, experience, gender, and ethnicity) but also firm characteristics. Given the information available at the firm level...

The urban labor market in Bolivia can be divided into 4 main sectors: 1) the public sector, 2) the formal private sector, 3) self-employed informals, and 4) informal workers. Although incomes are generally higher in the public sector and in the formal private sector, there is a strong preference...

This paper analyses non-agricultural work supplied by rural households in Bolivia. It is shown that roughly 50% of all rural households complement their incomes through non-agricultural work, but that households in the lowlands are more likely to do so than households in the highlands. Since...

This paper utilizes a unique three-wave panel of household data from Nicaragua, which allows a thorough exploration of the relationships between migration, remittances and household consumption. The paper distinguishes between the effects of emigration and the impacts of remittances received....

Poverty in Bolivia continues to be among the highest in Latin America despite decades of concerted national and international efforts to reduce it. Bolivia has meticulously followed the recommendations of the Washington consensus at the same time as external aid has been generous and foreign...

This document investigates the effectiveness of foreign aid in Bolivia. When comparing accumulated aid in each sector during the period 1998-2002 with the progress in each sector during the same period, it becomes clear that the four sectors receiving by far the most aid (Institutional...

Brazil has long ago removed most of the perverse government incentives that stimulated massive deforestation in the Amazon in the 70s and 80s, but one highly controversial policy remains: Road building. While data is now abundantly available due to the constant satellite surveillance of the...

After several decades of “state-capitalism” characterized by import substitution policies, Bolivia implemented in 1985 a New Economic Policy (NEP) following neo-liberal ideas of free trade, privatization, and liberalization of capital flows. It was hoped that the opening up of the economy...

This paper estimates structural parameters of both a simple and an extended job separation model with the purpose of understanding constraints in the labor market in Bolivia. The results confirm the hypothesis that skilled labor is a scarce commodity in Bolivia, while unskilled labor is...

This paper seeks to test to which extent geographical constraints can be blamed for Bolivia’s poor growth performance during the last three decades. Although geographical characteristics are too stable to explain the dramatic fluctuations in growth rates over time in Bolivia, there are at...