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Publication
Guatemala’s Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene Poverty Diagnostic: Challenges and Opportunities
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-03)Poverty rates in Guatemala are among the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Guatemala is now the second poorest country in the region, with only post-earthquake Haiti being poorer. Guatemala is an extreme outlier in the region in terms of chronic malnutrition, and almost half of all children in the country suffer from stunting. This report is part of a global initiative to improve the evidence base on the linkages between water supply, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), human development, and poverty and seeks to understand this paradigm through a careful examination of trends in access to water and sanitation and in corresponding linkages to poverty and health. It also reviews the governance structure and expenditure plans underpinning service delivery in WASH sectors in Guatemala. Finally, the report the challenges facing the water and sanitation sector in Guatemala are significant and will require, among other things, stronger political leadership to successfully reform and regulate the sector, greater focus on rural sanitation, and increased spending and budget execution. One of the key elements of this diagnostics is highlight what conditions led to a struggling WASH sector, particularly in rural areas. Despite a steep increase in water and sanitation coverage in the last 15 years, sanitation coverage is falling far behind drinking water coverage, with the lowest levels of coverage in rural areas affecting predominantly indigenous populations. -
Publication
Toward More Efficient and Effective Public Social Spending in Central America
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05-18)Central America has come a long way both in terms of economic and political stability. Increasingly the region is focusing on implementing productivity-enhancing reforms as well as supporting reductions in poverty and inequality. This report analyzes recent trends in public social spending in Central America from 2007 to 2014, conducts international benchmarking, examines measures of the effectiveness and efficiency of social spending, and discusses the quality of selected institutions influencing this spending. We examine total social spending, as well as detailing its four components: public spending on the education, health, and social protection and labor (SPL) sectors. In analyzing public social spending, the report addresses three crucial policy issues: (a) how to improve the coverage and redistributional incidence of public social spending; (b) how to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of public social spending; and (c) how to strengthen the institutions governing public spending in the social sector. While based heavily on a series of recent analytical social spending studies in six countries in the subregion—Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama—this report also takes a broader regional perspective and includes some comparisons to countries in other regions. -
Publication
Country Partnership Framework for the Republic of Guatemala for the Period FY17-20
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-10-17)Guatemala is at an historic juncture, following a political and institutional crisis in 2015, a newly elected government is starting to take on deep-rooted development problems. The crisis was triggered by the uncovering of a corruption scheme that permeated the tax administration superintendence (SAT) and the highest political levels. The country has enormous potential to generate growth and prosperity for its population; yet growth remains low, poverty and inequality persistently high, and high rates of childhood stunting threaten Guatemala’s ability to reach its full development potential. This glaring juxtaposition highlights the existence of two Guatemala’s, with large gaps in both social and economic outcomes. In this context, the World Bank Group’s (WBG) new country partnership framework (CPF) seeks to support Guatemala in fostering inclusion of vulnerable groups, and addressing bottlenecks to sustainable growth. -
Publication
Central America Social Expenditures and Institutional Review: Guatemala
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-08-25)Social spending in Guatemala needs to achieve efficiency gains and increase to minimum levels to meet basic human development objectives. Current levels are so low that fiscal reform (in revenue generation and spending allocation) is urgently needed so that the state can fulfill its mandated coverage and quality in social service provision. In the last ten years, Guatemala has had decent economic growth but failed to improve human development indicators or reduce poverty (which has increased). Low and inefficient public spending, coupled with outdated legal and institutional frameworks, are significant barriers to increasing enrollment and providing quality education. Moving forward, more efficient, equitable, and cost-effective public education spending will require some important policy and institutional changes, including greater use of the incipient monitoring and evaluation system. There is need for increased spending in social assistance interventions, better coordination among implementing agencies, and revised targeting to ensure decent coverage of programs among the poorest. On the institutional side, the launching of the Ministry of Social Development (MIDES) provided a platform to manage the different programs of the sector under one umbrella; however, MIDES has not yet been able to tackle technical deficiencies in implementation. -
Publication
Discrimination in Latin America : An Economic Perspective
(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank, 2010)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. -
Publication
Republic of Guatemala Country Environmental Analysis: Addressing the Environmental Aspects of Trade and Infrastructure Expansion
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-06-22)Since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, Guatemala has made substantial progress in consolidating peace and democracy. While progress in socioeconomic development has been uneven, there have been important gains in education and health coverage, sustained increases in social sector spending, improved coverage of basic utility services, and better management of public finances, among other gains. Unfortunately, progress has been slower than expected in several important areas, including economic growth rates. Based on the best regional and international practices, this report concludes that mainstreaming environmental considerations into sectoral policies rather than scaling-up the operations of environmental agencies is the best way to prepare Guatemalan institutions for current environmental challenges and those it will encounter in the future. The report also emphasizes the need to provide the right incentives to economic agents (e.g., promoting compliance through achievable requirements but with credible sanctions to violators, rather than trying to change behavior by threatening with criminal charges that are ultimately not enforced), and to engage civil society by improving information and participation mechanisms.