Economic Reforms, Financial Development and Growth: Lessons from the Chilean Experience

Despite reform efforts, the economic performance of Latin American countries during the 1990s was disappointing with the exception of Chile, which grew at almost 7% per year. This paper tries to explain this difference. Following recent literature that hiEconomic growth, reforms, institutions, financial development

Institutions, Economic Policies and Growth: Lessons From the Chilean Experience

A pesar del esfuerzo de reformas de las décadas pasadas, el desempeño económico y social de los países de América Latina durante los noventa fue bastante pobre. La excepción fue Chile, que creció a tasas promedio de 7% durante la mayor parte de la década y redujo significativamente su tasa de pobreza. Este trabajo intenta explicar esta notable diferencia. Siguiendo la literatura más reciente, que destaca el rol que juegan las instituciones y políticas en el crecimiento económico, argumentamos que el mejor desempeño de Chile se debió a que las reformas implementadas fueron mucho más profundas y abarcaron más áreas que aquellas implementadas en otros países de América Latina. Durante este proceso Chile terminó con fundamentos económicos más sólidos y, aún más importante, con mejores instituciones, lo que le permitió enfrentar de mejor manera los shocks adversos en los noventa. Basados en un modelo econométrico de corte transversal estimado para el período 1960-2000, argumentamos que el mejor desempeño de Chile vis-a-vis al resto de la región puede ser explicado en partes iguales por las mejores instituciones y políticas del país (en contraste, el mejor desempeño de Asia del Este es explicado principalmente por mejores políticas). Adicionalmente, estimamos que América Latina puede aumentar su tasa de crecimiento anual del producto per cápita un 1,6%, en promedio, si tuviera la calidad de instituciones de Chile. Por otro lado, si el promedio de los países de América Latina tuviera políticas (desarrollo financiero y sobrevaluación cambiaria) similares a Chile, la tasa de crecimiento anual del producto per cápita aumentaría en un 1,0%, en promedio. Concluimos que, para lograr tasas de crecimiento más altas, los países de América Latina deben avanzar en sus procesos de reformas y poner más énfasis en el desarrollo y fortalecimiento de sus instituciones, las cuales, como muestra la experiencia de Chile, pueden ser modificadas (aunque lentamente).

Financial System and Economic Growth in Chile.

This paper presents a brief overview of the current state of financial development in Chile, comparing it with other countries. After providing a short summary of the most important financial reforms of past decades, we highlight the main strengths and weaknesses of Chile’s financial markets. Next, we focus on some of the currently most pressing issues, namely, stock market liquidity, financial derivatives and venture capital, and discuss whether or not recent reforms and proposed ones properly address them.

The Information Contained in Forward Rates Movements in Chile

The purpose of this paper is to examine the information contained in the term structure of inflation-linked interest rates in Chile with respect to expected future interest rates. Using the present discounted value methodology developed by Campbell and Ammer (1993), we decompose excess returns on inflation-linked bonds of maturities from two to five years during the period 1999-2006 into news about future interest news and term premiums. According to the results, a large fraction of the variance of the unexpected returns (between 43% and 67%) can be attributed to term premiums, and therefore we should be careful in attributing movements in the forward curve exclusively to movements in the expected path of future interest rates.

Latin American immigrants are less likely to be authorized to work in the U.S. than similar immigrants from other countries.

Employment based visa programs offer a way for hundreds of thousands of foreign individuals to work in the U.S. every year. But is there any bias in who gets approved and who does not? In new research that examines nearly 200,000 labor certification applications, Ben A. Rissing and Emilio J. Castilla find that foreign workers from Latin America are 23 percent less likely than Canadians to be certified to work in the U.S., and that Asians are 13 percent more likely to be approved than Canadians. This said, they find no statistically significant differences in approval outcomes by immigrant world region during government evaluations of audited applications – which are reached using detailed employment-relevant information. To address unequal outcomes in these assessments, Rissing and Castilla suggest that the foreign worker citizenship field within the labor certification application be removed during government evaluations

Goods and factor market integration: a quantitative assessment of the EU enlargement

The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equi- librium model with trade in goods and labor mobility across countries to study and quantify the economic effects of trade and labor market integration. In our model trade is costly and features households of different skills and nationalities facing costly forward-looking relocation decisions. We use the EU Labour Force Survey to construct migration flows by skill and na- tionality across 17 countries for the period 2002-2007. We then exploit the timing variation of the 2004 EU enlargement to estimate the elasticity of migration flows to labor mobility costs, and to identify the change in labor mobility costs associated to the actual change in policy. We apply our model and use these estimates, as well as the observed changes in tariffs, to quantify the effects from the EU enlargement. We find that new member state countries are the largest winners from the EU enlargement, and in particular unskilled labor. We find smaller welfare gains for EU-15 countries. However, in the absence of changes to trade policy, the EU-15 would have been worse off after the enlargement. We study even further the interaction effects between trade and migration policies and the role of different mechanisms in shaping our results. Our results highlight the importance of trade for the quantification of the welfare and migration effects from labor market integratio

Microarray tools to unveil viral-microbe interactions in nature

The interactions between viruses and their microbial hosts play a central role in the control of microbial communities in nature. However, the study of such interactions within the uncultured majority is technically very challenging. Here, we review how microarray tools can be used to analyze the interactions between viruses and their microbial hosts in nature, away from laboratory pure culture-based models. We show examples of how DNA arrays have been used to study the expression of viral assemblages in natural samples, and to assign viruses to hosts within uncultured communities. Finally, we briefly discuss the possibilities of protein and glycan arrays to gain insight into the ways microbes interact with their viruses.Our current studies with viral microarrays are supported by projects CGL2012-39627-C03-01 (to Josefa Antón) and AYA2011-24803 (to Víctor Parro) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, which are co-financed with FEDER support from the European Union

Immunoanalytical Approach for Detecting and Identifying Ancestral Peptide Biomarkers in Early Earth Analogue Environments

Several mass spectrometry and spectroscopic techniques have been used in the search for molecular biomarkers on Mars. A major constraint is their capability to detect and identify large and complex compounds such as peptides or other biopolymers. Multiplex immunoassays can detect these com-pounds, but antibodies must be produced for a large number of sequence-dependent molecular targets. Ancestral Sequence Re-construction (ASR) followed by protein "resurrection" in the lab can help to narrow the selection of targets. Herein, we propose an immunoanalytical method to identify ancient and universally conserved protein/peptide sequences as targets for identifying ancestral biomarkers in nature. We have developed, tested, and validated this approach by producing antibodies to eight previously described ancestral resurrected proteins (three beta-lactamases, three thioredoxins, one Elongation Factor Tu, and one RuBisCO, all of them theoretically dated as Precambrian), and used them as a proxy to search for any potential feature of them that could be present in current natural environments. By fluorescent sandwich microarray immunoassays (FSMI), we have detected positive immunoreactions with antibodies to the oldest beta-lactamase and thioredoxin proteins (ca. 4 Ga) in samples from a hydrothermal environment. Fine epitope mapping and inhibitory immunoassays allowed the identification of well-conserved epitope peptide sequences that resulted from ASR and were present in the sample. We corroborated these results by metagenomic sequencing and found several genes encoding analogue proteins with significant matches to the peptide epitopes identified with the antibodies. The results demonstrated that peptides inferred from ASR studies have true counterpart analogues in Nature, which validates and strengthens the well-known ASR/protein resurrection technique and our immunoanalytical approach for investigating ancient environments and metabolisms on Earth and elsewhere

Biomarker Profiling of Microbial Mats in the Geothermal Band of Cerro Caliente, Deception Island (Antarctica): Life at the Edge of Heat and Cold

© María Ángeles Lezcano et al. 2019.Substrate–atmosphere interfaces in Antarctic geothermal environments are hot–cold regions that constitute thin habitable niches for microorganisms with possible counterparts in ancient Mars. Cerro Caliente hill in Deception Island (active volcano in the South Shetland Islands) is affected by ascending hydrothermal fluids that form a band of warm substrates buffered by low air temperatures. We investigated the influence of temperature on the community structure and metabolism of three microbial mats collected along the geothermal band of Cerro Caliente registering 88°C, 8°C, and 2°C at the time of collection. High-throughput sequencing of small subunit ribosomal ribonucleic acid (SSU rRNA) genes and Life Detector Chip (LDChip) microarray immunoassays revealed different bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic composition in the three mats. The mat at 88°C showed the less diverse microbial community and a higher proportion of thermophiles (e.g., Thermales). In contrast, microbial communities in the mats at 2°C and 8°C showed relatively higher diversity and higher proportion of psychrophiles (e.g., Flavobacteriales). Despite this overall association, similar microbial structures at the phylum level (particularly the presence of Cyanobacteria) and certain hot- and cold-tolerant microorganisms were identified in the three mats. Daily thermal oscillations recorded in the substrate over the year (4.5–76°C) may explain the coexistence of microbial fingerprints with different thermal tolerances. Stable isotope composition also revealed metabolic differences among the microbial mats. Carbon isotopic ratios suggested the Calvin–Benson–Bassham cycle as the major pathway for carbon dioxide fixation in the mats at 2°C and 8°C, and the reductive tricarboxylic acid cycle and/or the 3-hydroxypropionate bicycle for the mat at 88°C, indicating different metabolisms as a function of the prevailing temperature of each mat. The comprehensive biomarker profile on the three microbial mats from Cerro Caliente contributes to unravel the diversity, composition, and metabolism in geothermal polar sites and highlights the relevance of geothermal-cold environments to create habitable niches with interest in other planetary environments.This study has been funded by the Spanish Research Agency (AEI) from the Ministry of Science Innovation and Universities and the European FEDER Grants Nos. ESP2015-69540-R, RYC2014-19446, and CGL2015-74254-JIN; the AEI Project No. MDM-2017-0737 Unidad de Excelencia ‘‘Marı´a de Maeztu,’’ and the European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG) No. 307496. M.A´ . Lezcano and M.A´ . Fernández Martínez were supported by a postdoctoral fellowship by the Youth Employment Initiative from the European Union and implanted in Comunidad de Madrid