Julian Messina – författare

Entrepreneurship—manifested in the entry of new firms or products into new markets, or substantial improvements in technological capacity or process innovation by incumbent firms—is widely considered to be an important ingredient for long term economic development. Entrepreneurship in Latin America and the Caribbean argues that entrepreneurship is also a source of employment generation, export growth, and resilience during economic downturns.Although the conventional wisdom suggests that Latin American and Caribbean countries underperform relative to China and other emerging markets in terms of its entrepreneurial dynamism, this report provides evidence suggesting that the region is characterised by substantial entrepreneurship. The main challenge in the region is not a lack of entrepreneurs, but rather their relatively low level of innovation and the slow growth of incumbent firms. The report discusses the nature of new entrants into markets and the factors that might help stimulate private-sector innovation after firms have survived the initial test of market competition.

This report seeks to explain the over-time trends in wage inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) since the mid-1990s. It explains how wage inequality has been associated with household-income inequality in LAC in the past decades, and discusses how labor-supply and labour-demand trends have affected wage inequality.The Latin American region achieved something truly remarkable during the 2000s: it sustained vigorous economic growth with declining inequality. Other regions in the world grew strongly during this period, but this growth was not shared equitably. However, lower commodity prices and slower growth in China have reduced Latin America’s growth prospects in recent years. At the same time, inequality reduction has halted in many countries. As the new low-growth scenario hits labor markets, it is important to ask whether the social gains of the 2000s can be sustained. Will lower wage growth occur across all segments of the wage distribution in Latin America, or will the slowdown disproportionately hurt those who have less? Will the economic slowdown put the brakes on the reduction of wage inequality in Latin America? To answer these forward-looking questions and to know what to expect, it is essential to understand the causes of the observed changes in wage inequality in the past decades, which is the focus of this research project.