Andres Velasco

• London School of Economics and Political Science

Over one-third of humanity lives under populist regimes—and many of those regimes are turning increasingly authoritarian. It is a worldwide challenge to liberal democracy. The conventional wisdom is that bad economics is to blame: the losers from globalization are angry and voting populists into office is their revenge. The policy implication is a...

This report was written by The Committee on International Economic Policy and Reform, a non-partisan and non-ideological group of independent experts, comprised of academics and former government and central bank officials. The objective of the group is to analyze global monetary and financial problems, offer systematic analysis and advance reform...

Most of the chapters in this volume were prepared for a conference in honor of Guillermo Calvo, organized by the International Monetary Fund’s Research Department and held at Fund headquarters in Washington, DC, on April 15–16,2004. At the editors’ request, a couple of chapters were specially prepared after the conference for inclusion in this volu...

Poner fin a los graves problemas que presenta el transporte público en Santiago (tiempos de viaje largos, congestión, inseguridad, alta tasa de accidentes, mala calidad del servicio, contaminación acústica y del aire), sostienen los autores de este trabajo, supone diseñar una regulación moderna que vaya más allá de las licitaciones de los años nove...

What Does "Reform" Mean? More than a decade after market-oriented reforms were launched in al-most every Latin American country, the picture is not encouraging. Per capita growth reached almost 2 percent a year in the 1990s—a far cry from the dismal negative 0.7 percent during the "lost decade" of the 1980s—but hopes have been dashed nonetheless. O...

In the aftermath of the debt crisis, developing countries are endeavoring to repatriate flight capital and to resume domestic private investment. Yet investment and the associated capital inflows continue to be disappointing and highly uneven over time in many cases. This paper provides a model of investment and capital movements in and out of such...

This paper introduces increasing returns to domestic capital into a standard optimizing model of international portfolio selection. The resulting system displays surprising dynamic behavior. Endogenous cycles of any length may occur around the steady-state equilibrium, with both capital flows and asset prices displaying regular fluctuations. Initia...

This paper starts from a simple model of the domestic banking sector and develops the potentially destabilizing macroeconomic consequences of its role in intermediating foreign capital inflows. Both financial and balance of payments crises may result, reminiscent of the Southern Cone experience.