World Bank Policy Research publications: poverty trap, Latin America and globalization, etc...

Acabo de receber, e ainda não li, mas vou ler pelo menos dois.
O primeiro tem a minha total discordância, por princípio, pois a noção de uma armadilha da pobreza é inerentemente anti-econômica. Todos podem progredir, desde que os estímulos certos sejam dados.
Essa coisa de armadilha da pobreza não é uma armadilha, e sim elites corruptas, governos incompetentes, ladrões e fenômenos no gênero. Todos podem se alçar na escala econômica.
O segundo, sobre a América Latina e a globalização, me parece um tanto distorcido.
É evidente que a América Latina deveria estar plenamente inserida no processo.
Se não o faz, mais uma vez é devido a governos incompetentes, elites ineptas, geralmente as duas coisas...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Table of Contents Do Poverty Traps Exist? Aart Kraay, World Bank - Development Research Group (DECRG) David McKenzie, World Bank - Development Research Group (DECRG), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Voter Response to Natural Disaster Aid: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Drought Relief Payments in Mexico Alan Fuchs, United Nations Development Programme Lourdes Rodriguez-Chamussy, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Can Latin America Tap the Globalization Upside? Augusto de la Torre, World Bank Tatiana Didier, World Bank Magali Pinat, World Bank Learning from Financial Crises Jamus Jerome Lim, World Bank Geoffrey Minne, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

^top WORLD BANK POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER ABSTRACTS "Do Poverty Traps Exist?"  World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6835 AART KRAAY, World Bank - Development Research Group (DECRG) Email: akraay@worldbank.org DAVID MCKENZIE, World Bank - Development Research Group (DECRG), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Email: dmckenzie@worldbank.org This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood as self-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individuals or countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured the interest of many development policy makers, because poverty traps provide a theoretically coherent explanation for persistent poverty. They also suggest that temporary policy interventions may have long-term effects on poverty. However, a review of the reduced-form empirical evidence suggests that truly stagnant incomes of the sort predicted by standard models of poverty traps are in fact quite rare. Moreover, the empirical evidence regarding several canonical mechanisms underlying models of poverty traps is mixed. "Voter Response to Natural Disaster Aid: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Drought Relief Payments in Mexico"  World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6836 ALAN FUCHS, United Nations Development Programme Email: alan.fuchs@undp.org LOURDES RODRIGUEZ-CHAMUSSY, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Email: mlrodriguez@iadb.org The paper estimates the effects on presidential election returns in Mexico of a government climatic contingency transfer that is allocated through rainfall-indexed insurance. The analysis uses the discontinuity in payments that slightly deviate from a pre-established threshold, based on rainfall accumulation measured at local weather stations. It turns out that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering drought relief compensation. The paper finds that receiving indemnity payments leads to significantly greater average electoral support for the incumbent party of approximately 7.6 percentage points. The analysis suggests that the incumbent party is rewarded by disaster aid recipients and punished by non-recipients. The paper contributes to the literature on retrospective voting by providing evidence that voters evaluate government actions and respond to disaster spending. "Can Latin America Tap the Globalization Upside?"  World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6837 AUGUSTO DE LA TORRE, World Bank Email: adelatorre@worldbank.org TATIANA DIDIER, World Bank Email: tdidier@worldbank.org MAGALI PINAT, World Bank Email: mpinat@worldbank.org This paper discusses the theoretical arguments in favor of and against economic globalization and, with a view to ascertaining whether Latin America may be able to capture the globalization upside, examines the trends and salient features of Latin America's globalization as compared with that of Southeast Asia. The paper focuses on trade and financial integration as well as the aggregate demand structures (domestic demand-driven versus external demand-driven) that underpin the globalization process. It finds that Latin America is mitigating some bad side effects of financial globalization by moving toward a safer form of international financial integration and improving its macro-financial policy frameworks. Nonetheless, Latin America's progress in raising the quality of its international trade integration has been scant. The region's commodity-heavy trade structures and relatively poor quality of trade connectivity can hinder growth potential to the extent that they are less conducive to technology and learning spillovers. Moreover, Latin America's domestic demand-driven growth pattern (a reflection of relatively low domestic savings) may become an additional drag to growth by accentuating the risk of a low savings-low external competitiveness trap. "Learning from Financial Crises"  World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6838 JAMUS JEROME LIM, World Bank Email: jlim@worldbank.org GEOFFREY MINNE, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) Email: gminne@ulb.ac.be This paper considers the question of whether international banks learn from their previous crisis experiences and reduce their lending to developing countries in the event of a financial crisis. The analysis combines a bank-level dataset of bank activity and ownership with country-level data on the stock of historical crisis events between 1800 and 2005. To circumvent selection and endogeneity concerns, the paper exploits temporal variations in the relative recency of crises as instruments for crisis experience. The results indicate that foreign banks with greater crisis experience reduced their lending significantly more relative to other foreign banks, which can be interpreted as evidence in favor of a learning effect. The findings survive robustness checks that include alternative measures of crisis experience, additional controls, and decompositions into different types of crises. The question of learning is also examined from the perspective of other measures of bank performance.