Report of the Sixteenth Meeting of the Regional Council for Planning of the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES)

Caribbean development report: A perusal of public debt in the Caribbean and its impact on economic growth

This paper examines the genesis and evolution of debt and debt overhang in the Caribbean with individual case studies, to extract lessons and make broad recommendations with regard to appropriate mechanisms and policy measures that can be implemented to reduce the debt burden of the subregion. The econometric model utilized in the paper has shown that a one percent increase on debt to GDP ratio causes a 0.015decline in real GDP growth for the countries in the Caribbean panel, suggesting that debt has a pernicious effect on growth on Caribbean economies. What is even more worrisome was that Car…

Personal income tax and income inequality in Ecuador between 2007 and 2011

This paper uses data from individual income tax returns to explore the redistributive effect of personal income tax in Ecuador between 2007 and 2011. Following common practice in tax incidence analysis, we first compute indices of income tax progressivity and redistributive impact. We then mobilize microsimulation techniques to simulate the redistributive effect of personal income tax under different taxable income scenarios. Finally, we calculate the effective tax rates paid by top income groups and derive a range of optimal income taxes for the top 1% income group. We obtain two main empiric…

The mining canon and the budget political cycle in Peru’s district municipalities, 2002-2011

This study seeks to determine whether access to a larger volume of funds from the mining canon affects the level of capital spending by district mayors in election years. The effect of Peru’s electoral cycles on district public investment (from 2002 to 2011), and how this relates to the mining canon, is analysed in terms of the budget political cycle, using a fixed-effects panel model. The results show that the mining canon has a differential effect in the 20% of districts that receive the largest amounts; but, in general, there is no clear cyclicality between capital expenditure in these muni…

CEPAL Review no. 123

The Hummingbird Vol.4 No.10

Preliminary programme. Sixteenth meeting of the Regional Council for Planning of the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES)

CEPAL Review no.121

Disasters, economic growth and fiscal response in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, 1972-2010

The aim of this study is to estimate the impact of geological and climate-related disasters on the per capita growth rates of gross domestic product (GDP) and fiscal expenditure in Latin American and Caribbean countries. The results show that the effects vary by type of disaster and by subregion. In the Caribbean countries, the per capita GDP growth rate has typically responded negatively to climate disasters, whereas the response to a geological disaster has generally not been statistically significant. In Central American countries, the response of the per capita GDP growth rate was found to…

The political economy of the fiscal deficit in nineteenthcentury Chile

A structural shift in the trend toward higher deficits had emerged by the middle of the 1860s in Chile. For some authors, this was the result of increased spending owing to a fastgrowing economy. Another common explanation is the higher spending required to finance and then recover from the war against Spain, which began in 1864. This article provides an alternative explanation for the country’s fiscal disarray during that period, suggesting that it was motivated largely by increased political turmoil at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century in Chile that ended with the ou…

Report of the Twenty-sixth meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Council for Planning of the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES)

Exploring financial technology

Caribbean economies

ECLAC Thinking, Selected Texts (1948-1998)

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in 1998 the anthology Fifty years of ECLAC thought: selected texts, was published in Spanish and Portuguese, as a selection of the Commission’s classic works spanning the period from its inception through to the 1990s. Since then, that volume has become an obligatory reference in studies on Latin American development for readers who are familiar with either of those two languages; and it has been widely used in the region’s university courses, both in economics and in soc…

Progress report on the tasks given to the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) in Resolution CRP/CV/01 and proposals for work, 2016-2017

Provisional agenda. Twenty-sixth meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Council for Planning of the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES)

Annotated provisional agenda and organization of work. Twenty-sixth meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Council for Planning of the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES)

The Hummingbird Vol.3 No.11

The Hummingbird Vol.3 No.10

Information and communications technology for people with disabilities