Search results for "America"

Addressing Social Heterogeneity: Comparative Policy and Performance in Latin America

2012

Abstract Social heterogeneity has always been a critical problem in Latin American societies. The paper analyzes how Latin American democratic governments tackle social inequality and what effects these strategies have. Five countries are compared qualitatively-two countries with moderate left governments, following moderate strategies (Chile, Brazil) and two cases with radical left governments, following more radical strategies (Venezuela, Bolivia). In addition, Mexico is included as a control due to its conservative government. Different policy strategies are described and the effects of the policies are analyzed. Do radical efforts yield a better result regarding social equality? The re…

Redes de colaboración y producción científica sudamericana en medicina clínica, ISI Current Contents 2000-2009

2012

Background International collaboration is increasingly used in biomedical research. Aim To describe the characteristics of scientific production in Latin America and the main international collaboration networks for the period 2000 to 2009. Material and methods Search for papers generated in Latin American countries in the Clinical Medicine database of ISI Web of Knowledge v.4.10 - Current Contents Connect. The country of origin of the corresponding author was considered the producing country of the paper. International collaboration was analyzed calculating the number of countries that contributed to the generation of a particular paper. Collaboration networks were graphed to determine the…

Regional Inequality in Latin America: Does It Mirror the European Pattern?

2020

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the comparative evolution of regional inequality over the course of the historical economic development processes in four countries of South West Europe—France, Italy, Portugal and Spain—and nine countries of Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Our analysis, which goes back to the nineteenth century, shows that regional income inequality has followed over time what appears now to be an N-shaped evolution in both regions. However, both experiences differ markedly and we identify the main stylized facts of these trajectories. First, Latin America begun the period with higher levels of regional i…

ASSESSING THE RIGHT TO A “DIGNIFIED LIFE” IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS PROTECTION Judicial Success or Failure?

2016

Tis contribution aims at assessing whether or not, and for what reasons, the concept of the “right to a dignifed life” – i.e. the right not to be prevented from having access to minimum living conditions compatible with human dignity – provides an appropriate and effective means to address violations of social and cultural rights within the Inter-American System. Afer presenting the main aspects of the right to live a dignifed existence and contextualising it within the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACtHR) in the area of economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights), the analysis focuses on the main strengths and weaknesses that, on both a conceptual and a p…

Do firms share the same functional form of their growth rate distribution? A statistical test

2014

We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms data, considering functional forms belonging to the Subbotin family of distributions. While our hypotheses are rejected for the vast majority of sets at the sector level, we cannot rejected them at the subsector level, indicating that homogenous panels of firms could be described by a common functional form of growth rate distribution.

“A certain amount of ‘recantation’”: On the origins of Frank H. Knight’s antipositivism

2016

The aim of this paper is to investigate in some detail the origins of Knight’s antipositism and to assess the main influences that brought him to a change in methodological perspective after 1921. As importantly, what follows is also an attempt to increase our general understanding of the methodological debates taking place during the early decades of the last century and to shed new light on the inherently pluralistic character of US interwar economics. This paper is organized as follows: the first section outlines Knight’s methodological views as presented in his early works; the second section discusses Knight’s “recantation” and his attack on behavioristic social science; the third sect…

Money Doctoring After World War II: Arthur I. Bloomfield and the Federal Reserve Missions to South Korea

2009

In this paper we analyse the scientific contributions of the New York Fed economist Arthur I. Bloomfield. A Canadian born economist, in 1941 Bloomfield took his PhD in economics at the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Jacob Viner and then joined the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a Research Economist and stayed there until 1958. In this position, Bloomfield combined scholarly research on recent economic history and international financial and banking problems with active service as a member of various committees and commissions, both in the United States and abroad. While on leave from the Fed, he accepted appointments as a consultant and advisor to various …

Springboarding: a new geographical landscape for European foreign investment in Latin America

2011

Assessing the performance of the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry: Are domestic and foreign banks so different?

2015

AbstractThis paper studies the relative performance of domestic and foreign banks in the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to compute technical efficiency scores for the years 2001 and 2013. Our main contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we assess performance at the level of the management of specific production factors. On the other hand, we distinguish program efficiency from managerial efficiency, which allows us to evaluate whether the differences in technical efficiency between national and foreign banks are due to the use of different technologies (program efficiency) or, conversely, differences in the managerial capacities of manager…

ARE LAC COOPERATIVE AND COMMERCIAL BANKS SO DIFFERENT IN THEIR MANAGEMENT OF NON‐PERFORMING LOANS?

2018

This paper assesses technical efficiency in the management of non‐performing loans (NPLs) in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) banking industry. To that end, Data Envelopment Analysis techniques are employed with data from the years 2013 to 2016 on a sample of 307 LAC cooperative and commercial banks. Our main contribution to existing literature is that differences of efficiency between cooperative banks and commercial banks are assessed as the result of the different capacities of their managers – managerial efficiency – and the so‐called programme efficiency, which represents differences in the technology used by these two categories of entities. Our principal result suggests that th…