After the currency devaluation of 2002, tariffs on public services were frozen in Argentina and public utilities contracts were put under renegotiation. The sector of water and sanitation is relatively in disadvantage with respect to other Latin American countries of the similar level of...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is not a unique explanation for growth and progress, but is one of the more useful indicators of the open opportunities. It reveals preferences of the developed countries’ private sector, while the emerging economies seem to participate in a global bid. That bid...

The literature highlights the role of finance in growth. There is evidence on the connection (correlation and causalities) between deeper finance (banking and non banking) and growth. We ask if some countries achieve better results, in terms of growth, with comparable levels of finance. To...

This paper deals with the reaction of the life insurance industry to ageing and the next massive decumulation phase of pension funds worldwide. The industry has a well-established product, which is the annuity, a unique instrument to cope with longevity risk. But annuity markets remain thin....

Inlfation targeting is a relatively new way to administer the monetary policy, since the velocity of money revealed unstable and hard pegs unsustainable. The new regime is one of flexible exchange rates, and the target of the monetary policy becomes the rate of inflation itself, instead of any...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically whether the market discipline works, and if so, whether it is a complement or substitute of prudential regulation in the insurance markets. Market discipline is intended as “the power of … market forces … to evaluate and...

This paper examines the technical efficiency of Argentinean pension funds management companies using a random stochastic frontier model to rank the pension funds management companies, taking into account heterogeneity in the data. The empirical findings reveal that efficiency measures have a...

This paper is aimed to answer a set of questions through an examination of the literature and empirical evidence on annuities. Every section of the paper try to address one specific question, naming: How important is the ageing problem in the world? How is social security being replaced or...

Longevity is increasing in the whole world, and savings for retirement are growing quickly. There is a potential demand for certainty in the income streams for pensioners since old-fashioned pay-as-you-go systems became financially stressed. A financial product, the annuity contract, offers...