This report by the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) of the World Bank studies the region's fiscal policies. After reviewing LAC's growth performance, Chapter 1 provides an accounting of its financing needs during the 21st Century to understand how such a...

This report by the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) of the World Bank studies the region’s fiscal policies. After reviewing LAC’s growth performance, Chapter 1 provides an accounting of its financing needs during the 21st Century to understand how such...

This paper analyzes the business cycle characteristics of the economies of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States using a model of a small open economy subject to interest rate and fiscal expenditure shocks and financial frictions. The paper shows that macroeconomic aggregates in this...

This study investigates the role of domestic and external shocks in business cycle fluctuations in Paraguay during 1991?2012. Time-series methods and a structural model-based approach are used to conduct an integrated analysis of business cycles. First, structural vector autoregression is used...

This paper aims to document a set of stylized facts characterizing business cycle dynamics in smaller economies. The paper uses a large sample of countries spanning 1960-2014 to show that country size is a significant factor affecting countries' volatility, comovement with gross domestic product...

This paper documents some previously neglected features of sectoral shares at business cycle frequencies in OECD economies. In particular, we find that the nontraded sector share of output is as volatile as aggregate GDP, and that for most countries, the nontraded sector is distinctly...