What is the impact of political decentralisation in Latin America? This book considers the problems raised by political decentralisation in the region and identifies the challenges ahead. Political decentralisation tends to devolve a certain amount of financial responsibility to the sub-national...

In this paper we test the impact of elections on fiscal policy in Latin American economies in comparison to OECD countries over the period 1990-2006. We find that in Latin American countries, the average primary balance declines by an amount close to 0.7 per cent of GDP during an election year,...

Over the past decade we have witnessed a double convergence. Aid donors have developed a growing interest in the private sector while private banks have set about creating corporate social responsibility programs, sustainable lending and microfinance programmes. As a consequence, the dialogue...

Strong growth in China and India has led to improvements in raw-material exporting countries' terms of trade and attracted complementary finance. The long-term challenge for these countries, where institutions are often fragile, is to avoid the so-called “resource curse”. This paper aims to...

GDP per capita in Latin America has been falling behind high-income countries and other benchmarks for decades and the region’s mediocre growth performance is one of the main reasons why poverty reduction, and living standards more generally, in the region is well below that observed in peer...

This paper combines development and growth accounting exercises with economic theory to estimate the relative importance of total factor productivity and the accumulation of factors of production in the economic development performance of Latin America. The region’s development performance is...