abstract in this paper we test two versions of convergence hypothesis namely deterministic or conditional convergence and stochastic or catching up hypothesis using carrion-i-silvestre et al. (2005) stationary test. the results show latin and south american countries (lsa) catching up process toward the usa failed in 1980s and somewhat in 1990s. but in 2000s most of them could lie in convergenc...

Education, Governance and Trade-Related Technology Diffusion in Latin America This paper examines the impact on TFP of North-South trade-related technology diffusion in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). North-South R&D flows are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South trade patterns, and input-output relations in the South. The main findings are: (i) Education ...

North-South Trade-Related Technology Diffusion: Virtuous Growth Cycles in Latin America This paper examines the impact on TFP in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and in other developing countries (DEV) of trade-related foreign R&D (NRD), education and governance. The measures of NRD are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South trade patterns, and input-output re...

This paper examines the growth experience of Latin America and discusses future prospects. For this purpose we use alternative approaches. We first perform growth decompositions to look at the behavior of total factor productivity and examine differences across regions of the world and within Latin America. Then, we use cross-country growth regressions to compare the relative performance of Lat...

In this paper I deal with a number of issues related to financial instability in Latin America. I first discuss, from a macroeconomic research perspective, what I believe are some of the most important policy issues faced by the Latin American nations. These include the effectiveness of controls on capital inflows, the effect of exchange rate depreciation on output, and the international transm...

We investigate the effects of IMF stabilization programs, and the reasons behind the unusually high IMF activity and relatively low program completion rates in Latin America. We base our tests on a panel, and distinguish between IMF program approvals and completion. We find that Latin America has higher output costs of IMF programs (especially when completed), no improvement in the current acco...

The author develops the first comparative empirical study of bank failures during the nineties between East Asia and Latin America using bank-level data, in order to address the following two questions: (i) To what extent did individual bank conditions explain bank failures? (ii) Did mainly the weakest banks, in terms of their fundamentals, fail in the crisis countries? The main results for Eas...

We estimate multivariate quantile models to measure the responses of the six main Latin American (LA) stock markets to a shock in the United States (US) stock index. We compare the regional responses with those of seven developed markets. In general, we document weaker tailcodependences between the US and LA than those between the US and the mature markets. Our results suggest possible diversif...

Corruption, Shadow Economy and Income Inequality: Evidence from Asia A number of recent studies for Latin America show that as the size of the informal economy grows, corruption is less harmful to inequality. We investigate if this relationship is equally compelling for developing countries in Asia where corruption, inequality and shadow economies are considerably large. We use Panel Least Squa...

This paper examines retirement behaviour and household income for older persons in Chile. It pays close attention to the sources of household income, income inequalities, and the economic vulnerability of older persons. This is important in order to evaluate whether labour market and social security reform in Latin America will improve the welfare of older groups, and especially their vulnerabi...