The literature on industrial districts in advanced and less developed countries has shown that clustering helps local enterprises overcome growth constraints and compete in distant markets. Nevertheless, recent contributions have stressed that more attention needs to be paid to external linkages...

This paper seeks to provide a systematized framework for the main ideas that have been developed by ECLAC concerning the effects that market-led reforms have had on labour, financial and technology markets. In order to explore these questions further, a research project has been undertaken by...

We explore the ability of core inflation to predict headline CPI annual inflation for a sample of 8 developing economies in Latin America during the period January 1995-May 2017. Our in-sample and out-of-sample results are roughly consistent in providing evidence of predictability in the great...

We analyse the evolution of Manufacturing Value-Added per inhabitant in 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries during the period 1980-2002, and present a comparison with more industrialized countries. We find that very few Latin American countries have experienced an increase in that variable...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the “social capital” theories that link civil society and democracy. Using data from the Civil Society Index for 44 countries, we find that not only this relationship exists, but that civil society is also positively correlated with human...

Microenterprises represent 88.4% of Latin American enterprises, and many countries in the region have developed microenterprise promotion policies in recent years; however, rigorous evaluation remains a pending issue. To shed light on the research done on this topic over 20 years and propose a...

With variations across countries, Latin America’s economic agenda will change over the next few years. Fiscal policy will be monitored more independently, and may lean more against cycles. Financial regulation will be heavier, and less attuned with a single international model. Innovation will...

This paper takes up a question frequently raised but rarely addressed empirically - do macroeconomic policy changes and exogenous macro shocks have significant impacts on poverty and income inequality more generally? For 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past two decades,...

Early childhood nutrition is thought to have important effects on education, broadly defined to include various forms of learning. We advance beyond previous literature on the effect of early childhood nutrition on education in developing countries by using unique longitudinal data begun during...

Most investigations of the importance of and the determinants of adult cognitive skills assume that (a) they are produced primarily by schooling and (b) schooling is statistically predetermined. But these assumptions may lead to misleading inferences about impacts of schooling and of...