ECONOMICS OF DEVELOPMENT
The Rising Americas
Andrés Velasco
Can Latin America’s economies overcome their entrenched low productivity? Will growing inequality undermine the region’s greater prosperity? Is narcotics trafficking a greater threat to democracy than the fight against it? How can the region diversify away from commodity-led growth? What sort of great power will Brazil become?
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Latin America’s Stymied Innovators
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 2012-01-27The main challenge facing Latin America is to transform its huge natural-resource wealth into the kind of wealth that does not run out, because it is constantly enlarged by human creativity. Indeed, if a diversified economy is the best predictor of future growth, Asia will grow much faster than Latin America for decades to come.... read Comments: 2 Recommended: 0 Read: 8040
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Latin America’s Monetary-Policy Test
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 2011-12-30On matters of sex, the citizens of mostly Roman Catholic Latin America often proclaim one thing and practice something very different. On matters of monetary policy, Latin central banks often do essentially the same thing.... read Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 6039
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Jobs for Justice
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 2011-11-25
Inequality almost everywhere, including China, has become so extreme that it must be reduced. In the not-so-rich countries of the global south, much inequality is the consequence of an old problem: lack of employment opportunities for the poor.... read Comments: 3 Recommended: 1 Read: 9087
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Britain’s Path of Denial
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 2011-10-25The worse the British economy tanks, the more fervently Prime Minister David Cameron’s ministers and Tory economists insist that draconian spending cuts are good for economic growth. The longer this goes on, the more serious the problem will become, making a non-inflationary recovery even more difficult to achieve.... read Comments: 4 Recommended: 0 Read: 12077
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Argentina’s Bumpy Ride
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 2011-09-23
The question making the rounds in Argentina nowadays is whether the period of plenty since the country's default a decade ago is coming to an end. With imports still growing strongly and commodity prices beginning to fall as a result of the world slowdown, the country's trade surplus is disappearing quickly, while inflation is rising sharply.... read Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 15043
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Eurobonds without Fear
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 2011-08-18The debate about whether and how to introduce Eurobonds has focused on the appropriate limits on issuance. But the right question is not what to do when debt gets near its limit, however high or low; it is how to prevent debt from getting near that limit in the first place.... read Comments: 4 Recommended: 0 Read: 17707
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How to End the Greek Tragedy
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 2011-07-20
Greece’s debt-service burden is too large, and it must be reduced in one of two ways: sharply cutting the interest rate paid by Greece, or reducing the face value of the debt. European policymakers are leaning towards the second option, but they evidently have not yet fully considered the implications.... read Comments: 1 Recommended: 1 Read: 17203
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Common Sense on Capital Controls
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas 
2011-06-21Those who claim that capital controls are ineffective seldom specify at what they are presumed to be ineffective. In fact, by reducing the share of short-term foreign-currency debt in a country’s total liabilities, capital controls can reduce vulnerability to financial crises.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 15897
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Latin America’s Glossed Decade
Andrés Velasco Series: The Rising Americas
2011-05-18
The Inter-American Development Bank declared last July that this would be “Latin America’s Decade,” an idea subsequently endorsed by The Economist and repeated by countless apologists and experts. But, as in the past, the basis of the current wave of giddiness does not withstand scrutiny.... read Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 19171
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