CNE – Centro Para Una Nueva Economía – Center for a New Economy
Non-profit, economic research and policy development organization
In 2008, the Center for the New Economy, in fulfillment of its mission to provide rigorous, independent analysis to policymakers, the press, and the public at large, established a fiscal analysis program to monitor and keep track of important fiscal trends affecting the Puerto Rican economy. As part of that program, we developed a series of budget performance indicators, which we have updated with data from the budget for fiscal year 2009-10.
Some economists in the U.S. have started to talk about the Great Recession of 2009 when analyzing the current economic downturn. In the U.S. alone, home equity lost, between 2006 and 2008, $4.2 trillion; the value of retirement assets has declined by $2.3 trillion; while other investments and savings show losses of an additional $2.5 trillion.
In this paper we examine the establishment and operations of a CDA program in Caguas, Puerto Rico. This program affords us an opportunity to test whether asset-building policies can provide a new approach to social welfare in Latin American countries and Hispanic communities in the United States, a middle way between paternalistic, government-based social programs on the one hand and so-called neo-liberal approaches on the other.
Professors Steven Davis and Luis Rivera Batiz, in an analysis conducted for their contribution to the book The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth, published in 2006 by the Center for the New Economy and the Brookings Institution, found that a “truly striking feature of Puerto Rico’s economy is the underdeveloped state of its private sector.” According to their analysis, private sector employment rates in Puerto Rico are less than half the U.S. rates in recent decades.
Between 1870 and 1914 the world lived the high point of the first era of economic globalization. The globe was effectively connected through railways, steamships, and telegraph lines.
The rule of law is one of the most important institutions for economic development. For Friedrich von Hayek, Nobel prize winner in economics, the rule of law meant that “government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed beforehand ā€“Ā rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.”
The current economic situation, both locally and globally, is the most complicated the world has seen since the Great Depression. In the midst of all this complexity is it imperative that we see things as they really are in order to properly diagnose the situation and to prescribe the correct course of action.
Puerto Rico’s credit rating has been in the news recently. When the government of Puerto Rico or one of its agencies issues bonds, credit rating agencies, such as Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Rating Services, analyze various quantitative and qualitative factors that may affect the borrower’s ability and willingness to repay, including, but not limited to, the financial condition of the borrower, the prevailing economic conditions in the island, and the political environment at the time of going to the market.
