A scandal that involves high-ranking officials from Costa Rica's three branches of government is testing the country's reputation for democratic stability.
The most likely future for NAFTA is neither continuity — that is off the table as per U.S. goals — nor a “modernized” agreement that the U.S. does not appear to want.
While academic and popular debates tend to focus on differential benefits and costs of trade across countries or industries, this brief highlights winners and losers at the level of individual firms. The authors demonstrate that preferential liberalization produces concentrated benefits among a relatively small number of very large and productive firms.
Pablo M. Pinto, Leonardo Baccini, Stephen WeymouthNovember 21, 2017
Nobody can ensure that the economic gamble underlying the 2013–2014 energy reform will achieve the desired or expected success. However, the author presents evidence demonstrating that Mexico has gradually been building the institutions that will be able to perform governmental operations with reasonable effectiveness.
This issue brief examines how produced water recycling in Texas oilfields threatens landowners’ ability to earn revenue from selling frac water and disposal services, a more lucrative revenue stream compared to raising cattle.
Public finance fellow Joyce Beebe discusses state and federal legislation aimed at granting states greater authority to collect sales taxes on remote online sales, as well as obstacles to those efforts.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro appears to be a month away from destroying all remnants of what was once one of Latin America's most stable democracies.
The landscape is changing for foreign direct investment in Latin America. Investments flow not only from north to south, but also from south to south and south to north. What's more, relatively small firms in developing countries are becoming as likely as multinationals to invest abroad.
NAFTA has neither been the enormous success that its supporters believe, nor the disaster that its detractors claim. Renegotiating NAFTA — or even threatening to repeal it — is not a high-stakes proposition. The treaty simply does not possess the leverage to deliver a major boost or setback to the U.S. manufacturing sector.