This third Annual Bank Conference on Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) focuses on trade liberalization policy, specifically "open regionalism," a term coined to describe the fact that 1) regionalism has gone hand in hand with unilateral trade opening:statistics on tariff and...

We re-examine the view that wars make strong states, taking advantage of panel data to address two of the most obvious endogeneity concerns that arise in this context: initial conditions and persistence of state capacity. Our main message is that, in modern times, there is no evidence that wars...