Research Library

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is starting her second term in office facing economic and political problems that feed into each other. These problems can be attributed to a large extent to mistakes her administration made during her first term. Rousseff’s macroeconomic policy proved to be inconsistent, and the choices she made in some key economic sectors, especially energy, were demonstrably disastrous. Rousseff now faces the enormous challenge of reconciling the leftwing populism that led her to victory with the inescapable need to regain the trust of the most dynamic sectors of Brazilian society, including the private sector.

On Feb. 24, 2015, public finance fellow John Diamond testified on tax reform before U.S. Senate Finance Committee.

South America is likely facing a "second wave" of Chinese investment. How will China's rise to global economic power — and its transition to a new economic growth model — impact South America?

This paper investigates how new potential and proposed regulations will influence the natural gas market in the United States in the coming decades, using the Rice World Gas Trade Model (RWGTM) to examine scenarios in which domestic natural gas development is stressed in a variety of ways. It considers a range of possible policy actions from the federal to the local level.

In this paper, author Peter Hartley examines the recent evolution of markets for LNG, focusing especially on the increasing amount of LNG being traded spot or under short-term contracts of less than four-years duration. Hartley argues that explanations for this increase, and other recent changes in LNG trading, imply that the proportion of LNG being traded under long-term contracts is likely to continue to decline and that the flexibility of long-term contracts for trading LNG is likely to continue to increase.

The United States and Cuba, it seems, are poised to resume diplomatic relations severed in 1961. Fellow Joe Barnes explains why normalization of relations between the two countries is simple "good sense." Read "Normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations: Long overdue" in the Dec. 18, 2014, Baker Institute Blog.

The decade 2003-2013 was an exceptional one for Latin America in social terms, but less clearly so in economic terms. Growth slowed down significantly after the exceptional factors that fed the 2003-2007 boom came to an end. The possible unwinding of the super-cycle in commodity prices and, to a lesser extent, of the expansionary monetary policy of the United States, has added new challenges. But the major issue is the need to overcome the poor long-term economic performance that has characterized the region in the post-market reforms period, particularly by adopting active production sector development strategies.