Latin America and the Caribbean should build on the considerable social and economic development the region has made in the past two decades by taking additional steps to improve fiscal management as a path to higher productivity, innovation, and growth, according to a new book from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The publication, Fiscal Institutions of Tomorrow, describes how fiscal discipline enabled many countries to avoid the bouts of volatility, high inflation and devaluations that marked the 1980s and 1990s. The benefits of this discipline were evident during the recent global economic crisis...