The paper shows that international government borrowing from multilateral development banks is countercyclical while international government borrowing form private sector lenders is procyclical. The countercyclicality of official lending is mostly driven by the behavior of the World Bank...

After more than a decade of pro-market reform in Latin America, symptoms of fatigue are evident among all the major players: public opinion polls show that most individuals think the reforms have not been beneficial, policymakers seem to have lost their reform zeal, and neither opinion leaders...

This paper uses opinion surveys to document discontent with the pro-market reforms implemented by most Latin American countries during the 1990s. The paper also explores four possible sets of explanations for this discontent: (i) a general drift of the populace's political views to the left;...

This paper exploits a rich collection of household surveys to investigate the wage differential between the public and private sectors in 17 Latin American countries during the 1980s and 1990s. The paper also studies how the sector of employment affects the gender wage gap. The paper finds very...

The future of structural reforms in Latin America is under discussion. This paper synthesizes the facts and opinions that underlie this debate. The paper starts by analyzing the status of public opinion of the reform process and points out that disillusionment with the reforms has been growing,...

The purpose of this paper is to present evidence on public-private wage differential for a sample of Latin American countries and to discuss the relationship between public-private wage differentials and bureaucratic quality in the Region. The paper starts by estimating public-private wage...

Recent empirical and theoretical literature on the impact of real exchange rate devaluations on economic performance questions the traditional expansionary effect generated within standard Mundell-Fleming models. Contractionary devaluations may arise when firms face maturity or currency...