Recently the development community has talked a lot about knowledge and innovation as a key priority for the years to come, maybe induced by the lesser relevance that financial support has for many emerging countries. Multilateral and bilateral agencies have suddenly become knowledge banks, global practices, ideas’ generators, developers of innovation ventures, etc. In the … [Read more...] about Innovation policy spillover effects: the unaccounted benefits
Argentina
Sustainable Energy for Argentina’s Norte Grande
By Alberto Levy Since mid-2000, Argentina has undertaken a historic and comprehensive strategy to promote sustainable development in the Norte Grande region, one of the poorest areas in the country. The centerpiece of the strategy is to provide prompt, good-quality, and low-cost sustainable energy that can improve the competitiveness of businesses and spur new economic … [Read more...] about Sustainable Energy for Argentina’s Norte Grande
Is innovation a threat to employment in Latin America?
Joint blog post with Gustavo Crespi The relationship between innovation and employment has never been an easy one. For a long time innovation was seen as a potential threat to employment and economists got to the point of defining technological unemployment as a disease. The argument was that technological change could create unemployment through the substitution of … [Read more...] about Is innovation a threat to employment in Latin America?
Who cares if you don’t pay your taxes?
By Carlos Scartascini Tax evasion is endemic in many countries. In particular, some developing countries like Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Guatemala do not collect even half of what they should if taxpayers complied with the written letter of the law, according to recent studies summarized in Corbacho, Fretes Cibils, and Lora (2013). This problem is … [Read more...] about Who cares if you don’t pay your taxes?
Inequality of opportunity: an emerging body of literature
By: Lucas Figal Garone Academia, general public and governments seem to understand inequality differently. While many in academia and in the public sector focus on the measurement of the distribution of certain outcomes – e.g. income or total consumption –, in the real world, people seem to care about opportunity: that all individuals have the same opportunities to … [Read more...] about Inequality of opportunity: an emerging body of literature