For many decades, trade policy in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) had involved very high levels of protection and of government intervention. The active pursuit of import substitution policies reduced the openness and efficiency of the regions economies. It also increased their external...

This paper documents the spread of fiscal rules in the developing world and investigates the relation between fiscal rules and procyclical fiscal policy. We find that, since the early 2000s, developing countries outnumbered advanced economies as users of fiscal rules. Rules were adopted either...

This paper reviews the evolution of certain price and nonprice competitiveness indicators in Chile and concludes that the pecuniary loss of competitiveness associated with the appreciation of the peso since the late 1980s has been broadly offset by productivity gains and adjustments in factor...

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This paper reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential usefulness of apparently inefficient policy instruments in overcoming the self-selection constraints...