The Limits of Stabilization: Infrastructure, Public Deficits, and Growth in Latin America

by William Easterly, William Easterly (Editor)

Latin America's macroeconomic crises of the 1980s and '90s forced a severe fiscal adjustment across the region. More often than not, fiscal stability was achieved at the cost of a drastic compression of public infrastructure spending, accompanied by the hope that the private sector would take the leading role in infrastructure provision. This book documents the major trends in infrastructure provision in Latin America over the past two decades n order to assess the consequences of this changed public-private partnership from the perspective of economic growth, public finances, and the quantity and quality of infrastructure services. It will be of particular interest to those in the fields of infrastructure, fiscal policy, and economic growth, and anyone concerned with Latin America's development. For orders originating outside of North America, please e-mail pubdistributors@worldbank.org.

232 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

William Easterly is Professor of
Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU's Development Research Institute. He is editor of Aid Watch blog, Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. He is the author of The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), 3 other co-edited books, and 59 articles in refereed economics journals. William Easterly received his Ph.D. in Economics at MIT. He was born in West Virginia and is the 8th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio, where he grew up. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank. He is on the board of the anti-malaria philanthropy, Nets for Life. His work has been discussed in media outlets like the Lehrer Newshour, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Economist, the New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor. Foreign Policy magazine inexplicably named him one of the world’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2008. His areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth, the political economy of development, and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. William Easterly is an associate editor of the American Economic Journals: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Comparative Economics and the Journal of Economic Growth.

Taken from his website.

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Governmental bureaucrats doing the only thing they know to do: writing papers. Not books. Just papers. The overall reason is the same thing over again: all fish live under water, mackerel is a fish so you have to hire my nephew too.