Roxana Barrantes Cáceres

As part of the Fulbright Educational Partnerships project, Kellogg will host Roxana Barrantes Cáceres, a research associate and member of the Board of Directors of the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), as well as an associate professor in the department of economics at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

Barrantes will spend the spring semester exploring the political economy of the Peruvian budget allocation process. In particular, her research will focus on the creation of special funds, public resources specifically allocated to a particular end. Preliminary research indicates that in the last ten years up to thirty such funds have been created by Congress in response to the demands of various interest groups. With the creation of a fund, the particular interest group is assured of public funding, but less public money is available for other legitimate uses, including the provision of general public goods. The hypothesis Barrantes will test is whether these funds give credibility to the political system while at the same time undermining the ability of the political process to redistribute resources among the general population.

Barrantes has served as an advisor to a variety of NGOs and policy-making bodies in Peru concerned with telecommunications, transportation, the environment and natural resources, and development and social programs. Currently, she is working on the institutional and regulatory model of Limabus, the public transportation service in Lima, and is coordinator of the Training and Research Program on Environmental and Forestry Policy in Peru, financed by the MacArthur Foundation and implemented by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Consortium (CIES). She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.