Latin American Development Forum

41 items available

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This series promotes debate and disseminates knowledge and analysis on economic and social development issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. Books in this series discuss economic growth, structural reforms, social security, globalization and its social effects, poverty reduction strategies, macroeconomic stability and capital flows, financial systems and market reforms, and more. Sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the World Bank, the series seeks to convey the excitement and complexity of the most topical issues in the region. Titles in this peer-reviewed series are selected for their relevance to the academic community and represent the highest quality research output of each institution.

Items in this collection

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  • Publication
    Left Behind: Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean
    (2016-07-20) Lucchetti, Leonardo; Vakis, Renos; Rigolini, Jamele
    One out of every five Latin Americans—about 130 million people—have never known anything but poverty, subsisting on less than US$4 a day throughout their lives. These are the region's chronically poor, who have remained so despite unprecedented inroads against poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean since the turn of the century. This book takes a closer look at the region’s entrenched poor, who and where they are, and how existing policies need to change to effectively assist the poor. The book shows significant variations of rates of chronic poverty across and within countries. The book posits that refinements to the existing policy toolkit —as opposed to more programs—may come a long way in helping the remaining poor. These refinements include intensifying efforts to improve coordination between different social and economic programs, which can boost the income-generation process and deal with the intergenerational transmission of chronic poverty by investing in early childhood development. In addition, there is an urgent need to adapt programs to directly address the psychological toll of chronic poverty on people’s mindsets and aspirations, which currently undermines the effectiveness of existing policy efforts.
  • Publication
    From Right to Reality : Incentives, Labor Markets, and the Challenge of Universal Social Protection in Latin America and the Caribbean
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012-03-13) Ribe, Helena; Robalino, David A.; Walker, Ian
    This series was created in 2003 to promote debate, disseminate information and analysis, and convey the excitement and complexity of the most topical issues in economic and social development in Latin America and the Caribbean. This volume aims to move the debate forward by: 1) developing a common policy framework for the region's Social Protection (SP) system as a whole, including health insurance; 2) providing guidelines on ways to extend coverage through rationalizing financing mechanisms and the design of redistributive arrangements; and 3) making the case for improved coordination of policies and programs. Building on careful, detailed analysis of a wealth of data on social protection programs across Latin America and the Caribbean, this book addresses these challenges in a thorough yet accessible manner. Although the analysis is comprehensive, the authors focus primarily on three fundamental questions that must be faced by any effort to strengthen social protection in the region: how can programs protect the most vulnerable without promoting informality and dampening incentives to work and save? How can programs ensure that scarce public resources are used for subsidies that are transparent, fair, and effective-and not for badly targeted and regressive benefits for formal sector workers? Finally, how can programs reinforce human capital development so that the more mobile workers that the region needs are able to insure themselves through savings or risk-pooling arrangements, thus reducing vulnerability and the need for subsidies?
  • Publication
    Discrimination in Latin America : An Economic Perspective
    (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank, 2010) Moro, Andrea; Nopo, Hugo; Chong, Alberto; Nopo, Hugo; Chong, Alberto; Moro, Andrea
    The chapters presented in this volume adopt a variety of these methodological tools in order to explore the extent to which discrimination against women and demographic minorities is pervasive in Latin America. In chapter two, Castillo, Petrie, and Torero present a series of experiments to understand the nature of discrimination in urban Lima, Peru. They design and apply experiments that exploit degrees of information on performance as a way to assess how personal characteristics affect how people sort into groups. Along similar lines, in chapter three, Cardenas and his research team use an experimental field approach in Colombia to better understand pro-social preferences and behavior of both individuals involved in the provision of social services (public servants) and potential beneficiaries of those services (the poor). In chapter four, Elias, Elias, and Ronconi try to understand social status and race during adolescence in Argentina. They asked high school students to select and rank ten classmates with whom they would like to form a team and use this information to construct a measure of popularity. In chapters five and six, Bravo, Sanhueza, and Urzua present two studies covering different aspects of the labor market using different methodological tools. Based on an audit study by mail, their first study attempts to detect gender, social class, and neighborhood of residence discrimination in hiring practices by Chilean fir. In a second study, they use a structural model to analyze gender differences in the Chilean labor market. In chapter seven, Soruco, Piani, and Rossi measure and analyze possible discriminatory behaviors against international emigrants and their families remaining in southern Ecuador (the city of Cuenca and the rural canton of San Fernando). Finally, in chapter eight, Gandelman, Gandelman, and Rothschild use micro data on judicial proceedings in Uruguay and present evidence that female defendants receive a more favorable treatment in courts than male defendants.