Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is the only global South region wherein just one country, Ecuador, has become a full member of the AIIB, in November 2019 after 22.5 months. Seven more countries are “prospective” members, in order of joining: Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. This chapter introduces the research question that has guided this book: Why have the Latin American prospective members of the AIIB been so unsuccessful at complying with the membership-completion process?

This study estimates the impact on property value of one of the first Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Data comes from two real estate internet sites for neighborhoods surrounding the BRT. The empirical methodology is innovative since it combines traditional spatial hedonic pricing with matching and weighted regressions, using propensity score estimates. Robustness checks are based on trimmed samples.

The objective of this paper is to identify determinants of the reductions in the use of labor observed in Argentine agriculture. The paper focuses on the 2002-2018 period, using data from the last two publications of the Censo Nacional Agropecuario (the census undertaken in 2008 is incomplete).

We study how distributive politics affects political budget cycles and voting within a federal country. Our model predicts not only that the president favors politically aligned governors with larger transfers, but also that voters favor gubernatorial candidates aligned with the expected presidential incumbent because larger transfers are expected in the future. These predictions are upheld by the data from Argentinean provinces during the 1984–2014 period. Our findings imply that political alignment can trump the selection effect of voting the most competent candidate.

The value of the risk to life is a key element for benefit-cost analysis, enabling more rational public policy decisions in diverse areas as environmental, health, and crime.Wevalue the risk to life in the context of crime using a discrete choice experiment (CE). The method has clear advantages in that it applies to the whole population and does not require vast data from labor markets, for example.

For many reasons, dollarization is an efficient and realistic option for this country. Yet, in order to last, it must be able to withstand banking panics without the assistance of a conventional lender of last resort and the lobby of protected industries to revoke dollarization. To this end, we advance a model of commercial banking close to that of Panama, under foreign law, and argue for free trade agreements with superpowers to smooth out real-exchange rate fluctuations.

We conducted a randomized survey with 2,666 US residents to study preferences for legalizing payments to kidney donors. We found strong polarization, with many participants supporting or opposing payments regardless of potential transplant gains. However, about 18 percent of respondents would switch to favoring payments for sufficiently large increases in transplants. Preferences for compensation have strong moral foundations; participants especially reject direct payments by patients, which they find would violate principles of fairness.

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the cost-efficiency of Banco Ciudad de Buenos Aires’s bank branches using a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). Owing to the results, management can decide on a new branching dimension. Also, if some regulatory or managerial limits could be lifted, such as the closure or opening of new branches without central bank authorization, or redundancy staff reduction, the results could be important for management. We identify best and worst behaved branches.

Our aim is to answer: What are the average efficiency levels of the Argentine labor courts and how do they behave individually with respect to the average? Which are the determinants of the relative efficiency levels of those courts? Are there opportunities to introduce incentives which increase the efficiency of the courts? In doing so we estimate a Data Envelopment Analysis efficiency frontier, and in a second stage we analyze the efficiency scores drivers and the Judiciary career incentives.