This paper offers an economic and institutional assessment of 21st-century Latin American populism, particularly in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. We find that populism fails to offer the significant economic and social improvements that leaders promise and voters hope for....

In the months and years ahead, it is plausible, perhaps even likely, that the issue of renewed Western economic assistance for the DPRK, or North Korea, will return once again to policymakers‘ agendas. We should therefore ask: Could major inflows of Western aid lead to an economic...

Autocratic regimes often limit access to information concerning the outside world, to prevent their citizenry from learning about the comparatively poor performance of their economy. In this paper, we analyze the use of censorship, and consider it as an information asymmetry problem, in the...

This paper discusses the recent literature on the role of the state in economic development. It concludes that government incentives to enact sound policies are key to economic success. It also discusses the evidence on what happens after episodes of economic and political liberalizations,...