Download or read book Latin America Treads a Narrow Path to Growth written by Augusto De la Torre and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book LAC Semiannual Report April 2015 written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The April 2015 LAC Semiannual Report covers the short-term prospects and provides an analysis of the external factors affecting the region's economic performance. The first chapter expands on LAC's economic outlook paying special attention to the global context and its effect on LAC's economic performance. In this first Chapter we argue that the region experienced an external shock that has shaped growth in recent years, and that this shock is likely here to stay. Chapter 2 discusses the policy space available for LAC countries as they try to accommodate to the current global context. In particular, the first part of the second Chapter discusses the rather limited monetary fiscal and monetary space currently present in the region. The second part of the Chapter argues part of this limited policy space is associated to LAC's relatively low savings rate. Moreover, the Chapter shows that in addition to the potential positive effects that higher savings could have on policy space, it could also have a beneficial effect on long-term growth.

Download or read book LAC Semiannual Report April 2015 written by Augusto de la Torre and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2015-04-18 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The April 2015 LAC Semiannual Report covers the short-term prospects and provides an analysis of the external factors affecting the region's economic performance. The first chapter expands on LAC's economic outlook paying special attention to the global context and its effect on LAC’s economic performance. In this first Chapter we argue that the region experienced an external shock that has shaped growth in recent years, and that this shock is likely here to stay. Chapter 2 discusses the policy space available for LAC countries as they try to accommodate to the current global context. In particular, the first part of the second Chapter discusses the rather limited monetary fiscal and monetary space currently present in the region. The second part of the Chapter argues part of this limited policy space is associated to LAC’s relatively low savings rate. Moreover, the Chapter shows that in addition to the potential positive effects that higher savings could have on policy space, it could also have a beneficial effect on long-term growth.

Download or read book Innovation and Inclusion in Latin America written by Alejandro Foxley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that Latin America must confront two main challenges: greater innovation to increase productivity, and greater inclusion to incorporate more of the population into the benefits of economic growth. These two tasks are interrelated, and both require greater institutional capacity to facilitate both innovation and inclusion. Most countries in Latin America are struggling to escape what economists label “the middle income trap.” While much if not all of the region has emerged from low income status, neither growth nor productivity has increased sufficiently to enable Latin America to narrow the gap separating it from the world’s most developed economies. Although income inequality has diminished across much of the region in recent years, social vulnerability remains widespread and institutional weaknesses continue to plague efforts to achieve equitable development. This volume identifies lessons that can be learned and adapted from experiences within the region and in East Asia, where the middle income trap has largely been avoided. This book is the result of a collaborative project undertaken by American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies (CLALS) and the Corporation for Latin American Studies (CIEPLAN) in Chile, with financial support from the Inter-American Development Bank’s Office of Strategic Planning and Development Effectiveness.

Download or read book Vanishing Growth in Latin America written by Andrés Solimano and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic growth in Latin America and the rise of material welfare has lagged behind that of more dynamic areas of the world economy. In a region prone to policy experiments, the policies of the Washington Consensus applied since the 1990s failed to bring sustained growth to most of Latin America. Andres Solimano and an impressive set of contributors analyze the last 40 years in order to determine the role of economic reforms, external conditions, factor accumulation, income inequality, political instability and productivity in explaining GDP increases. The book also looks at cycles of growth, identifying periods of rapid growth and contrasting them with periods of stagnation and collapse.

Download or read book Fiscal Rules and Economic Size in Latin America and the Caribbean written by Fernando Blanco and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-10-10 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the collapse of commodity prices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in 2014-15, many countries in the region were unable to cushion the impact of the shock in order to experience a more gradual adjustment, to a large extent because they had not built adequate fiscal buffers during the commodities’ windfall from 2010-14. Many LAC countries entered 2020 and the COVID-19 crisis in an even more difficult position, with rising debt and limited fiscal space to smooth the negative impacts of the pandemic and adequately support their economies. Fiscal policy in most LAC countries has been procyclical. Public expenditure and debt levels have expanded in good times and contracted in severe downswings due to insufficient fiscal buffers, making crises deeper. Fiscal rules represent a promising policy option for these and other economies. If well-designed and implemented, they can help build buffers during periods of strong economic performance that will be available during rainy days to smooth economic shocks. This book—which was prepared before the COVID-19 crisis—reviews the performance and implementation of different fiscal rules in the region and world. It provides analytical and practical criteria for policy makers for the design, establishment, and feasible implementation of fiscal rules based on each country's business cycle features, external characteristics, type of shocks faced, initial fiscal conditions, technical and institutional capacities, and political context. While establishing new fiscal rules would not help to attenuate the immediate effects of this pandemic crisis, higher debt levels in the aftermath of COVID-19 will demand rebuilding better and stronger institutional frameworks of fiscal policy in LAC and emerging economies globally. Having stronger fiscal mechanisms that include fiscal rules can help countries prepare for the next crisis and should be on the front burner for policy makers in coming years. The findings and lessons discussed apply to economies of different sizes, with some differences under certain scenarios in terms of the technical design and criteria needed for implementation. In this book, policy makers will find that fiscal rules, if tailored to country characteristics, can work and be an essential fiscal tool for larger and particularly smaller economies.

Download or read book Managing for Learning written by Melissa Adelman and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can countries make sustainable gains in student learning at scale? This is a pressing question for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)--and the developing world more broadly--as countries seek to build human capital to drive sustainable growth. Significant progress in access has expanded coverage such that nearly all children in the region attend primary school, but many do not gain basic skills and drop out before completing secondary school, in part due to low-quality service delivery. The preponderance of evidence shows that it is learning--and not schooling in and of itself--that contributes to individual earnings, economic growth, and reduced inequality. For LAC in particular, low levels of human capital are a critical factor in explaining the region’s relatively weak growth performance over the last half century. The easily measurable inputs are well-known, and the end goal is relatively clear, but raising student achievement at scale remains a challenge. Why? Part of the answer lies in management--the managers, structures, and practices that guide how inputs into the education system are translated into outputs, and ultimately outcomes. While management is often mentioned as an important factor in education policy discussions, relatively little quantitative research has been done to define and measure it. And even less has been done to unpack how and how much management matters for education quality. This study presents new conceptual and empirical contributions that can be synthesized in four key messages: 1. Student learning is unlikely to improve at scale without better management. 2. Management quality can be measured and should be measured as a catalyst for improvement. 3. Management affects how well every level of an education system functions, from individual schools to central technical units, and how well they work together. 4. Several pathways to strengthening management are open to LAC countries now, with the potential for significant results. The study elaborates on each of these messages, synthesizing recent data and research and presenting the results of several new research initiatives from across the region.

Download or read book LAC Semiannual Report October 2015 written by Alain Ize and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2015 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1 of the report covers the short-term prospects and provides an analysis of the external factors affecting the region's economic slowdown. The focus is on the adjustment challenges faced by those Latin American countries experiencing a major adverse terms of trade shock, which comes after an unprecedented (in magnitude and duration) period of terms of trade bonanza. Chapter 2 discusses the key topic of this semiannual report, that is, the implications of the slowdown for labor markets on jobs and wages. We describe the broad labor market trends observed during the boom and contrast them with the patterns observed during the slowdown. We also describe the implications of the slowdown for inequality. A corollary of the observed labor market patterns during the slowdown is that some of the gains towards greater income equality achieved in the past decade or so may be reversed, at least in part, and that we may see a divergence between labor income inequality and household income inequality, whereby the latter may rise more than the former.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Download or read book Beyond the Debt Problem written by George Pratt Shultz and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book After the Washington Consensus Restarting Growth and Reform in Latin America written by and published by Peterson Institute. This book was released on with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the nature of the economic policy agenda that the region should be pursuing after the better part of a decade that was punctuated by crises, achieved disappointingly slow growth, and saw no improvement in the region's highly skewed income distribution. Diagnoses the first-generation (liberalizing and stabilizing) reforms that are still lacking, the complementary second-generation (institutional) reforms that are necessary to provide the institutional infrastructure of a market economy with an egalitarian bias, and the new initiatives that are needed to crisis-proof the economies of the region to end its perpetual series of crises.

Download or read book Uncharted Waters written by Richard Damania and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 21st century will witness the collision of two powerful forces - burgeoning population growth, together with a changing climate. With population growth, water scarcity will proliferate to new areas across the globe. And with climate change, rainfall will become more fickle, with longer and deeper periods of droughts and deluges. This report presents new evidence to advance understanding on how rainfall shocks coupled with water scarcity, impacts farms, firms, and families. On farms, the largest consumers of water in the world, impacts are channeled from declining yields to changing landscapes. In cities, water extremes especially when combined with unreliable infrastructure can stall firm production, sales, and revenue. At the center of this are families, who feel the impacts of this uncertainty on their incomes, jobs, and long-term health and welfare. Although a rainfall shock may be fleeting, its consequences can become permanent and shape the destiny of those who experience it. Pursuing business as usual will lead many countries down a 'parched path' where droughts shape destinies. Avoiding this misery in slow motion will call for fundamental changes to water policy around the globe. Building resilience to rainfall variability will require using different policy instruments to address the multifaceted nature of water. A key message of this report is that water has multiple economic attributes, each of which entail distinct policy responses. If water is not managed more prudently--from source, to tap, and back to source--the crises observed today will become the catastrophes of tomorrow.

Download or read book Beyond Tradeoffs written by Nancy Birdsall and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 1998-09-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin American income distribution is among the most unequal in the world. Both the poor and the wealthy have paid a price for this inequality, which is in part responsible for the region's low growth rates. The essays in this book propose new ways of reducing inequality, not by growth-inhibiting transfers and regulations, but by enhancing efficiency—eliminating consumption subsidies for the wealthy, increasing the productivity of the poor, and shifting to a more labor and skill-demanding growth path. In Beyond Tradeoffs, Latin American experts demonstrate how market-friendly measures in key policy areas can simultaneously promote greater equity and greater efficiency. By identifying win-win strategies, the authors challenge the conventional wisdom that there is always a tradeoff between these two objectives. Extensive macroeconomic reforms in the region have provided opportunities to implement such strategies across many sectors. The volume aims at building a "Latin consensus" on a second round of reforms—reforms that address the urgent issue of inequality without undermining efficient growth. Contributors include Jonathan Coles, Rene Cortazar, Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Luis Londoño, Nora Lustig, Moises Naím, and Joseph Stiglitz. Copublished with the Inter-American Development Bank

Download or read book Why Latin American Nations Fail written by Esteban Pérez Caldentey and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of development is a major topic in courses across the social sciences and history, particularly those focused on Latin America. Many scholars and instructors have tried to pinpoint, explain, and define the problem of underdevelopment in the region. With new ideas have come new strategies that by and large have failed to explain or reduce income disparity and relieve poverty in the region. Why Latin American Nations Fail brings together leading Latin Americanists from several disciplines to address the topic of how and why contemporary development strategies have failed to curb rampant poverty and underdevelopment throughout the region. Given the dramatic political turns in contemporary Latin America, this book offers a much-needed explanation and analysis of the factors that are key to making sense of development today.

Download or read book Left Behind written by Sebastian Edwards and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The political and economic history of Latin America has been marked by great hopes and even greater disappointments. Despite abundant resources—and a history of productivity and wealth—in recent decades the region has fallen further and further behind developed nations, surpassed even by other developing economies in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In Left Behind, Sebastian Edwards explains why the nations of Latin America have failed to share in the fruits of globalization and forcefully highlights the dangers of the recent turn to economic populism in the region. He begins by detailing the many ways Latin American governments have stifled economic development over the years through excessive regulation, currency manipulation, and thoroughgoing corruption. He then turns to the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s, which called for the elimination of deficits, lowering of trade barriers, and privatization of inefficient public enterprises—and which, Edwards argues, held the promise of freeing Latin America from the burdens of the past. Flawed implementation, however, meant the promised gains of globalization were never felt by the mass of citizens, and growing frustration with stalled progress has led to a resurgence of populism throughout the region, exemplified by the economic policies of Venezuela’sHugo Chávez. But such measures, Edwards warns, are a recipe for disaster; instead, he argues, the way forward for Latin America lies in further market reforms, more honestly pursued and fairly implemented. As an example of the promise of that approach, Edwards points to Latin America's giant, Brazil, which under the successful administration of President Luis Inácio da Silva (Lula) has finally begun to show signs of reaching its true economic potential. As the global financial crisis has reminded us, the risks posed by failing economies extend far beyond their national borders. Putting Latin America back on a path toward sustained growth is crucial not just for the region but for the world, and Left Behind offers a clear, concise blueprint for the way forward.

Download or read book Latin American Perspectives on Global Development written by Samuel Ernest Harrington and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although as a vast subcontinent, Latin America reflects diverse perspectives of life, senses of identity, cultural and spiritual outlooks, its constituting countries share a specific history of resistance against the prevalent patterns of global development. However, Latin America presents newer accounts of development understood as genuine views on human well-being derived from a sense of its own specific identity. In an emerging renaissance emphasizing human flourishing as the ultimate goal, Latin America is shifting gears towards an ethical perspective on global development. Distinct here is an emphasis on philosophy, theology, literature, arts, music, and cinema as fertile terrains depicting how the subcontinent must draw its own unique picture of development. Today, it is undergoing a diverse cultural, philosophical and spiritual growth, and holds exciting potential to be aligned with, and contribute to, the contemporary debates around the ethics of global development. This book discusses Latin American perspectives against the backdrop of the mainstream view of development, which portrays economic growth as development. It also looks at historical context, cultural diversity, cultural richness and the complex philosophy of life in the Latin American perspective to address the subcontinent’s deep cultural heritage, the depiction of its identity, and its philosophy of life. Additionally, this book discusses how the causes of inequality and malaises such as social crime can be eliminated, and more importantly, how the prosperity and economic, social, and human development of the subcontinent (and the world in general) may be improved.

Download or read book Latin America At The Crossroads written by Howard J. Wiarda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and controversial look at Latin America as it stands at a crossroads, this book analyzes the complex economic and social roots of the debt crisis and evaluates the prospects for new development strategies for the 1990s. Dr. Wiarda begins by placing the regional economic crisis in the larger context of technological change, political upheaval, and the international economy. He then explores new choices and realities in inter-American relations and the role international lending agencies can take to assist Latin America in meeting the challenge of the next decade. The author suggests that "smokescreens and mirrors" have obscured the true nature of the crisis and, as a result, have skewed the policy debate.

Download or read book Toward Renewed Economic Growth in Latin America written by Bela Balassa and published by Mexico City : Colegio de Mexico ; Washington, D.C. : Institute for International Economics. This book was released on 1986 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes a four-part strategy to restore self-sustaining economic growth in Latin America and simultaneously to enable the continent to cope with its external debt problems. The strategy aims to achieve economic growth in a way that produces a rapid expansion of employment, better distribution of income, and an improvement of social services.