Latin American Development Forum
27 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.
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Publication
Left Behind: Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean
( 2016-07-20)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. -
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New Century, Old Disparities : Gender and Ethnic Earnings Gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, 2012-09-07)Despite sustained economic growth at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Latin America and the Caribbean still faces high inequality and weak indicators of well-being among certain population groups. Women, people of African ancestry, and indigenous peoples are often at the bottom of the income distribution. The share of female-headed households rose in the past 20 years. By the beginning of the 1990s, women headed 1.2 percent of complete households (households in which both husband and wife are present) and 79.8 percent of single- head households. This book presents a regional overview of gender and ethnic disparities in labor earnings during this last turn of the century. Latin America and the Caribbean provide a rich environment for studying social inequality, because historical inequalities along gender and ethnic lines persist, despite positive indicators of economic development. The extent of inequality and its probable causes vary widely across the many countries in the region. The book adopts a sophisticated econometric methodology for measuring earnings gaps and applies it consistently across and within countries to measure gender and racial or ethnic differences. The analysis includes a dynamic dimension that sheds light on the evolution of earnings gaps over time. The book offers important insights on economic and political strategies that could be adopted to reduce inequality. The reduction of gender-based segregation in the workplace represents an area in which policy interventions can improve the efficiency of labor markets. Determining whether addressing occupational rather than hierarchical segregation is more effective is one of the areas of policy design to which this book aims to make a contribution. Latin America and the Caribbean is also a racially and ethnically diverse region, with some 400 ethnic groups. -
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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)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? -
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Does What You Export Matter? In Search of Empirical Guidance for Industrial Policies
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012)Does the content of what economies export matter for development? And, if it does, can governments improve on the export basket that the market generates through the shaping of industrial policy? This book considers these questions by reviewing relevant literature and taking stock of what is known from conceptual, empirical, and policy viewpoints. A large literature answers affirmatively to the first question and suggests the characteristics that distinguish desirable exports. More prosaically, but no less controversially, goods which are intensive in unskilled labor are thought to promote 'pro-poor' or 'shared growth,' whereas those which are skilled-labor intensive are thought to generate positive externalities for society as a whole. Concerns about macroeconomic stability have led to a focus on the overall composition of the export basket. This book revisits many of these arguments conceptually and, wherever possible, imports heuristic approaches into frameworks where, as more familiar arguments, they can be held up to the light, rotated, and their facets examined for brilliance or flaws. Second, the book examines what emerges empirically as a basis for policy design. Specifically, given certain conceptual arguments in favor of public sector intervention, do available data and empirical methods allow for actually doing so with a high degree of confidence? In asking this question, the book assumes that policy makers are competent and seek to raise the welfare of their citizens. This assumption permits sidestepping the debate about whether government failures trump market failures generically: In this sense, the book attempts to 'give industrial policy a chance.' -
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Breeding Latin American Tigers : Operational Principles for Rehabilitating Industrial Policies
(Santiago, Chile: United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)The specific structure of the book is as follows: chapter one reviews the current situation of Latin America, which historically has been a laggard in economic performance. Chapter two introduces the first principle: the urgency of developing a medium- to long-term strategy for productive transformation based on industrial policies. Chapter three focuses on the principle that strategies for productive transformation with modern industrial policies should rest on effective, locally grown public-private alliances. Chapter four introduces and illustrates principles 3-6, which focus on the 'how' of public sector leadership in the public-private alliance and the formulation and execution of strategies. Chapter five presents and illustrates principles 7-11, which are concerned with the public sector management of support programs and incentives. Chapter six shifts the focus to Latin America. It reviews the past and current nature of development strategies in the region, pointing to their strengths and weaknesses as tools for guiding productive transformation. In chapter seven, the author follow the path of principles 3-11 to critically evaluate the nature of public sector leadership in strategy execution and the modes for managing programs and incentives. Finally, chapter eight presents our central conclusions, which suggest that while some countries in Latin America have been planting the seeds of these 11 principles gleaned from our extra-regional success cases, they still have considerable work to do. -
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The Quality of Life in Latin American Cities : Markets and Perception
(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, 2010)This book suggests how that exploration should be undertaken, and how a monitoring system that has a solid conceptual basis and is both easy to operate and reasonable in cost can then be put into practice. Long the ideal of many scholars and observers of urban problems, such a system may now be close to realization. In this book, examples of Latin American cities are used as case studies. As argued in the first chapter, there are good reasons to concentrate on Latin America: it is the world region with the most rapid urban development and is the most urbanized region in the developing world. In contrast to residents of cities in poorer regions, Latin Americans have managed to democratize homeownership and to extend basic services to the majority of households. That means that improving the Quality of Life (QoL) in Latin American cities is no longer primarily a matter of bricks and mortar. But the challenges are as large as they are diverse. Chapter two introduces the reader to the hedonic price and the life satisfaction approaches and presents a comparative summary of the conclusions of the six case studies. This chapter, like the first, is essential for the policy maker or activist in urban affairs who wants to understand the possibilities of the new systems for monitoring the quality of urban life. Chapter three is a concise and self-contained introduction to the economic theory on which the hedonic pricing and life satisfaction approaches are based and which forms the backbone of this book. Chapters four-eight then summarize the most notable findings of the case studies, each emphasizing a different topic and focus. -
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New Policies for Mandatory Defined Contribution Pensions : Industrial Organization Models and Investment Products
(World Bank, 2010)The recent financial crisis is challenging the reform approach to mandated pension a scheme that has emerged over recent decades across the world. This reform approach is characterized by a move toward multi-pillar pension systems and includes the creation or extension of a mandatory funded pillar with defined contribution design. The rationale and viability of such a pillar is contingent on an enabling environment and the delivery of high risk-adjusted net rates of return that beat the natural benchmark, which is the internal rate of return that an unfunded mandated scheme is able to achieve. Two key aspects of mandated and funded defined contribution schemes have been under discussion and investigation since dedicated pension funds were created: (a) the high fees levied by privately organized pension funds and the consequence for the net rate of return; and (b) the investment products of these funds and their capability to address the investment risks and to deliver the expected retirement income in a life-cycle context. To this end, country policies have experimented with a variety of approaches to improve outcomes with some important leads but overall modest results. This book proposes to take a fresh and highly innovative look at both policy issues. It suggests stepping back and looking at the underlying causes of the issues at stake instead of merely trying to address their symptoms. In addressing the high fees of pension funds, it focuses on the less-than-ideal conditions inert consumers facing firms with market powers and proposes to apply solutions derived from industrial organization models and pricing methods that better reflect the cost structure of the supply of pension services. In addressing the investment risks, it asks how to improve fund managers' risk-adjusted investment performance when participants are inert. -
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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. -
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Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009)Over the past decade, faster growth and smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin America's poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and policy debates from poverty toward inequality, something to be expected in a region that exhibits the world's most regressive distribution of development outcomes such as income, land ownership, and educational achievement. This book is a breakthrough in the measurement of human opportunity. It builds sophisticated formulas to answer a rather simple question: how much influence do personal circumstances have on the access that children get to the basic services that are necessary for a productive life? Needless to say, producing a methodology to measure human opportunity, and applying it across countries in one region, is just a first step. On the one hand, technical discussions and scientific vetting will continue, and refinements will surely follow. On the other, applying the new tool to a single country will allow for adjustments that make the findings much more useful to its policy realities. And fascinating comparative lessons could be learned by measuring human opportunity in developed countries across, say, the states of the United States or the nations of Europe. But the main message this book delivers remains a powerful one: it is possible to make equity a central purpose, if not the very definition, of development. That is, perhaps, it's most important contribution. -
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China's and India's Challenge to Latin America : Opportunity or Threat?
(World Bank, 2009)China's and India's fast economic growth since 1990 is paralleled only by their growing presence in policy discussions throughout the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. The success of these Asian countries is looked upon with admiration, but there is also concern about the effects that growing Chinese and Indian exports may have on the manufacturing and service sectors throughout LAC. Blame for the private sector's poor performance in some LAC countries often falls on the growing presence of China, and to a lesser extent India, in world markets. The rest of this introduction is organized as follows: the next section summarizes the evidence on the positive aggregate effects of China's and India's growth in world trade markets, foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, and innovation activities on LAC economies, and is followed by a section presenting evidence on the effects of China's and India's growth within industries, concluding that negative effects are limited to certain manufacturing and service sectors, in particular in Mexico and to a lesser extent in Central America and the Caribbean. Next is a section that summarizes evidence of the effects of China's and India's growth on specialization patterns and factor adjustments, and actual and potential policy responses by LAC governments. The final section summarizes policy implications.