Ancor Suárez-Alemán

• Economist, PhD
• Economist at Inter-American Development Bank

La inversión en infraestructura económica y social de la región ha sido insuficiente, ineficiente, e insostenible hasta la fecha. El impacto de la pandemia no ha hecho más que exacerbar los problemas estructurales del sector. A la par del desarrollo de una agenda que suponga mejoras de eficiencia a los procesos de inversión pública, se requier...

Do differences in port performance explain differences in maritime transport costs? How much would improvements in port performance reduce maritime transport costs in developing countries? To answer this question, we use a widely used transport cost model, but we provide a new measure of port efficiency, estimated through a non-parametric approach....

América Latina y el Caribe ha realizado un enorme esfuerzo para aumentar significativamente los niveles de cobertura de agua y saneamiento a lo largo de las últimas décadas. Sin embargo, todavía persisten en el sector numerosos retos en términos de provisión, alcance y calidad del servicio. Con todo, las necesidades de inversión son elevadas, y los...

Mientras que en Reino Unido y otros países con mercados de Asociaciones Público-Privadas (APP) más profundos, la implementación de este mecanismo en el sector salud llega a representar aproximadamente un 20% del CAPEX de la cartera de APP, en ALC es aún un segmento naciente. Cinco países, Brasil, Chile, México, Perú y Colombia, usan de manera cada...

To close its infrastructure gap, Latin America and the Caribbean needs more than investment in new structures. It needs to become more efficient at investing in infrastructure and regulating a new range of services that have the potential to disrupt the energy, transport, and water sectors. The technological revolution makes a future with quality s...

Para cerrar su brecha de infraestructura, América Latina y el Caribe necesita algo más que invertir en nuevas estructuras. Debe ser más eficiente en las inversiones en infraestructura y en la regulación de una nueva gama de servicios que tienen el potencial para transformar los sectores de energía, transporte y agua. La revolución tecnológica vuelv...

In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), transportation constitutes one of the major items in the basket of good and services consumed by households. This paper describes household spending on transport in the region. Engel curves are estimated to understand the relationship between transport spending and changes in household income. Using income...

The urban population in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has increased significantly over the last decades. Currently, almost 80 percent of the LAC population lives in cities, that is, more than 525 million people, and this trend is projected to continue. More people mean more cars. Motorization rates in the region keep rising while the share...

The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region has a sizable infrastructure gap. Physical assets, maintenance, and service provision are inadequate and below average for a region at its level of development. The most promising way to close the service gap is to increase efficiency. Relying on data on more than 80 countries for 2000 and 2016, this pap...

This paper examines the impact of different public policies on air connectivity in remote regions. In particular, it estimates price and supply equations using route-level data for several countries around the world that have implemented route-based policies (public service obligations, traffic distribution rules), airline-based policies (state-own...

Understanding and recognizing the different transportation conditions and mobility behavior of low-income groups is extremely important for developing and delivering sustainable transportation systems (Lucas et al. 2016). Herein we deepen the understanding of transportation affordability in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), with a focus on urb...

During the 1960s and 1970s, the port infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean was badly maintained and often poorly managed. 1980s onward, technology advances like cargo containerization pushed the maritime transport industry into a fundamental restructuring of its service networks (Guasch et al., Structure, financing and risk management i...

Chapter 5 of the Inter-American Development Bank's 2018 Flagship Report: Better Spending for Better Lives

Appropriate port regulation and competitive forces tend to be related to higher levels of operational and economic performance of ports. From a policy-making perspective, pursuing efficiency and securing competition in ports to reach a level playing field is a two-step process requiring (1) ex-ante regulations to set the rules that maximize the com...

O objetivo deste estudo é apresentar a metodologia e estimação da primeira versão de um modelo de impacto regulatório dos Acordos internacionais de Serviços Aéreos (ASAs) celebrados pelo Brasil. O modelo tem o intuito de testar a hipótese de que a mudança regulatória no transporte aéreo internacional brasileiro foi um dos determinantes do crescimen...

Are tourist municipalities a breeding ground for corruption? Before the 2008 economic crisis, Spain experienced an economic boom, together with a surge in political corruption at the local level. In a tourism-oriented economy – tourism represents above 11% of country GDP – where most of the tourism activity is focused on certain municipalities, und...

América Latina y el Caribe ha hecho un importante esfuerzo por incrementar la inversión privada en infraestructura. Entre 1990 y 2011, esta región ha atraído inversiones privadas por más de US$ 672.000 millones (Serebrisky, 2014), siendo Brasil, Chile, Colombia, México y Perú los países que mayor monto de inversiones privadas han recibido. Cada vez...

Recently cable cars have come to be considered as an urban transport alternative in many cities. After the successful implementation of Metrocable in Medellin, Colombia, in 2004, other Latin American cities developed projects to incorporate cable cars as part of their public transport network. The system in La Paz and El Alto is the longest urban c...

South Asia’s trade almost doubled in the past decade, but the share of trade in GDP is still smaller (47 percent) than in East Asia (55 percent), and South Asia’s economic competitiveness continues to lag that of other regions. Part of the problem is the region’s container ports. As a result of inefficiencies, the average cost of exporting or impor...

During the last two decades, the European Union has led the promotion of Short Sea Shipping (SSS) corridors as an alternative to road transport. The need of establishing a level playing field between transport modes as well as of reducing congestion and other environmental damages from road transport have been pointed out as the main motivations of...

Why should people--and economies--save? The typical answer usually focuses on the need to protect against future shocks, to smooth consumptionduring hard times, in short, to save for the proverbial rainy day. This book approaches the question from a slightly different angle. While saving to survive the bad times is important, saving to thrive in th...

Passenger satisfaction has become a key factor for the operation of an airport. In recent years, a wide range of studies have analysed airport quality from many viewpoints but predominantly based on explicit and visible aspects of airport performance. Our paper suggests that passengers' assessments may also include implicit evaluation of features t...

La elección de la tasa social de descuento constituye uno de los elementos críticos en los procesos de evaluación de proyectos públicos, y en particular en el análisis costo-beneficio sobre el que aún persisten algunos problemas prácticos y cuestiones a resolver de especial interés. El presente documento aborda el rol de la tasa de descuento en la...

This paper examines saving and investment in LAC. The first section briefly reviews the literature on the relationship between saving and investment and the impact of investment on growth. The second section examines investment in LAC. The third section describes both foreign and national saving. The fourth section tries to identify the direction o...

The objective of this document is to conduct a critical review of the literature and international experiences on social discount rates from the central point of view of its usefulness for policy evaluation. - See more at: https://publications.iadb.org/handle/11319/7206?locale-attribute=en

Le succès de la participation du secteur privé à un projet d’infrastructure est étroitement lié à la capacité des pouvoirs publics à concevoir et à contrôler judicieusement la relation contractuelle liant les secteurs public et privé. Aussi importe-t-il de bien définir le mécanisme destiné à encadrer la participation du privé, tant en amont (contra...

The success of private sector participation in infrastructure is highly conditioned by the ability of governments to properly shape and control the public-private contractual relationship. Therefore, determining the accurate mechanism to control private participation becomes imperative, both ex-ante (by designing correct contracts, properly assigni...

In late 2011, the Spanish terrorist organization ETA announced the end of armed violence after more than forty years of illegal activity. While the existing literature has already established the negative impact of terrorist actions on international tourism in a particular region, this paper aims to determine whether ETA’s final ceasefire and defin...

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have proved to be more than adequate as a means to develop transport infrastructure, especially in the case of large-scale infrastructure such as ports. However, under certain specific circumstances they can lead to certain failures, and so huge public losses. Both the country's hard-hit economy and its vast exper...

Chile has a successful track record of introducing private finance in infrastructure investments (including ports) through concession contracts. However, under the current concession scheme, there is a high degree of risk associated with very large civil engineering works involved, such as building breakwaters for mega-port initiatives. In this pap...

This paper develops a port productivity and efficiency analysis of all developing regions between 2000 and 2010, using both parametric and nonparametric approaches. From a unique dataset – our sample covers 70 developing countries, 203 ports, and 1,750 data points–, we carry out an analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity and efficienc...

The Spanish Federation of Municipalities has, particularly since 2008, been vocal about a “chronic deficit” situation caused by high public expenditures in tourist areas. Within this context, new strategies to increase revenues have been proposed, including the introduction of tourist taxes. This paper contributes to this debate by determining if t...

From the perspective of Short Sea Shipping (SSS), as an intermodal competitor in the freight market, the time spent within the whole transport corridor is a major issue, in contrast to deep sea shipping where differences in time may not be as relevant as, for example, the contract of carriage or a ship’s position, among other aspects. Although ther...

This paper empirically studies the competitiveness of selected Short Sea Shipping (SSS) corridors by comparing the generalised costs of different alternatives to move cargo from Spain to several European destinations either by road or by using a SSS multimodal corridor. In the context of fair and efficient intermodal competition promoted by Europea...

Price is no longer the sole variable affecting consumer choice in the airline sector. Service quality, which has been analyzed from a range of perspectives, is of increasing importance in this market. Airlines provide a transportation service (typically for purposes of tourism) and so analyzing passenger assessments has become crucial in this compe...

Over the last decades, the European Union (EU) has devoted a large amount of effort and money to projects aimed at boosting some of its maritime corridors as a modal alternative to road or rail freight transport. However, the overall design of most of these programmes has ex post revealed as very ineffective. This paper suggests that promoting port...

Despite the European Union (EU) efforts promoting policies that encourage short sea shipping (SSS) based on its advantages in terms of intermodality and environment, this mode has not yet reached a significant market share compared to land transport. In this paper, we establish a thesis that suggests that funding programs (such as Marco Polo I and...

Using a dataset of consumption patterns in the island of Gran Canaria collected by the authors, this paper attempts to quantify some non-positive effects of tourism on destinations retail markets for goods and services. In particular, we empirically prove, controlling by factors such as population, size of supermarkets or number of competitors, two...

Using a dataset from consumption patterns in the island of Gran Canaria collected by the authors, this paper attempts to quantify some non-positive effects of tourism on local destination retail markets for goods and services. In particular, we empirically prove, controlling by factors such as population, size of supermarkets or number of competito...

The creation of the European Higher Education Area has meant a number of significant changes to the educational structures of the university community. In particular, the new system of European credits has generated the need for innovation in the design of curricula and teaching methods. In this paper, we propose debating as a classroom tool that c...

Este trabajo analiza los factores que afectan a la calidad de los aeropuertos, utilizando una base de datos con 114 aeropuertos internacionales en todo el mundo, en la que incluimos variables de calidad percibida por los usuarios, aspectos institucionales de la política aeroportuaria y de gestión, así como la participación accionarial. Los resultad...

This paper analyzes what are the factors that drive airport quality. We construct a database of 114 international airports worldwide that includes data on perceived quality by users (passengers and entrepreneurs), institutional aspects of airport policy and management by countries, and private participation in airports, among others. Estimations sh...