Highlights from the 5th Bolivian Conference on Development Economics

This year’s conference was hosted by Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz de la Sierra (UPSA) on November 14 and 15. It was attended by about 330 persons (a 64% increase compared to last year) from 13 different countries and consisted of 3 keynote lectures, a round table discussion on energy and 50 contributed research papers (see program here). The contributed papers had been selected from a pool of 110 submitted papers (a 59% increase compared to last year) and spanned a wide variety of topics related to the process of development. All the papers presented can be downloaded from the conference webpage.

The first keynote lecture was given by Eduardo Cavallo from the IADB and discussed the low savings and investment rates in Latin America. One of the implications of the low investment rates is that Latin America currently has public infrastructure that is far behind the levels in both OECD and Asia.

The second keynote speaker, Eduardo Engel from Yale and University of Chile, discussed whether Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) might be a solution to promoting crucial investment in public infrastructure such as highways. Some of the advantages of PPPs, as opposed to classic public provision, is that the bundling of construction and maintenance encourages a more optimal maintenance scheme, and that it tends to filter away “white elephants.” However, it does not relieve constrained public budgets.

The last keynote lecture was given by Roberto Rigobon from MIT, who, in a very entertaining way, explained how the Billion Prices Project at MIT gathers huge amounts of price information from the Web every day in order to inexpensively provide alternative measures of inflation for many countries in the World.

The round table session on energy was organized by Mauricio Garrón, Senior Energy Expert at the Andean Development Bank (CAF) and included the following three experts: Arturo Alarcón (Energy Specialist at the IADB), Sergio Arnéz (Project manager, Guabirá Energia S.A.) and Carlos Delious (President of the Bolivian Chamber of Hidrocarbons and Energy) who discussed the challenges facing the energy sector in Bolivia.

In between the plenary sessions, 50 papers were presented in parallel sessions on a wide variety of topics ranging from Martin Rossi’s captivating talk on first-day criminal recidivism in Uruguay, via Francisco Galarza’s exciting talk on the roles of beauty, race and sex in Peru’s labor markets, to Jeanne Lafortune’s excellent presentation on the impacts of early XXth century US immigration,

As usual, the Bolivian Academy of Economic Sciences had selected the best paper’s of the conference and the following authors received a Best Paper Award:

• José Tessada and Jeanne Lafortune (First place) for the paper “More Hands, More Power? Estimating the Impact of Immigration on Output and Technology Choices Using Early 20^th Century US Agriculture.”
• Leandro G. Adrian (Runner-up) for the paper “Terms of Trade and Fiscal Sustainability when the Sovereign Exploits a Natural Resource.”
• Ana Corbacho, Steve Brito and René Osorio (Runner-up) for the paper “Does Birth Under-Registration Reduce Childhood Immunization? Evidence from the Dominican Republic.”
• Mauricio M. Tejada (Runner-up) for the paper “Dual Labor Markets and Labor Protection I an Estimated Search and Matching Model.”
• Joaquín Morales Belpaire (Runner-up) for the paper “The King and Aid: NGOs under Autocracy.”
• Martin Fiszbein (Runner-up) for the paper “Agricultural Diversification and Development: Evidence from U.S. History.”

The Society of Bolivian Economists (SEBOL) also held its annual meeting, in which Lykke Andersen was promoted to President and in which the generous offer from UPB Cochabamba to host next year’s conference was officially accepted.

Special thanks are due to Natalia Zegarra from INESAD who did a magnificent job of coordinating the efforts of the six organizing institutions, the nine institutional sponsors, and the close to 60 presenters.