While most economists usually believe that privatization policy is socially beneficial, it faces increasing opposition in several countries. In this paper we wish to discover the ingredients in a recipe for privatization discontent. To do so we focus on Latin America, where there is wide...

Privatisation faces strong and increasingly popular opposition in Latin America. This paper uses individual data on social attitudes, socioeconomic status and demographic information from three waves of Latinobarometro surveys (1998, 2000 and 2002) in 17 countries to study the role of...

Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a...

The volatile movements in commodity prices during the last years have raised new questions to be discussed in both policy and academic spheres. Up to the financial slump of the second quarter of 2008 commodity prices grew fast for several consecutive years in a highly volatile context. The...

This paper aims at identifying the underlying reasons for substantial accumulation of foreign reserves, a strategy currently followed by a large number of countries. To this end, it first studies international liquidity conditions and individual country demand for reserves. It then analyses...

This paper presents and evaluates the hypothesis that emerging countries specialized in commodity production are prone to experience non orthogonal commercial and financial shocks. Specifically, we investigate a set of global macroeconomic variables that, in principle, could simultaneously...