Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries.
... See More + This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, the paper uses the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries. It finds important differences in development in early childhood across countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where panel data to follow children over time exists, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. These results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective non-response on the measure of cognitive development.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6779 FEB 01, 2014
In 2012, the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region continued its successful drive to reduce poverty and build the middle class. The proportion of the region's 600 million people living in extreme poverty, defined in the region as life on less than $2.50 a day, was cut in half between 2003 and 2012 to 12.3 percent.
... See More + Reflecting the upward mobility out of poverty, households vulnerable to falling back into poverty became the largest group in LAC in 2005, and represent almost 38 percent of the population. However, in the last two years, the share of vulnerable households has started to decline. The middle class, currently 34.3 percent of the population, is growing rapidly and is projected to replace the vulnerable as the largest economic group in LAC by 2016. The Southern Cone region (including Brazil) continued to be the most dynamic region and the main driver of poverty reduction in LAC, while poverty in Central America and Mexico proved more stubborn. About 68 percent of poverty reduction between 2003 and 2012 was driven by economic growth, with the remaining 32 percent arising from decline in inequality. Overall, equality of access to basic childhood goods and services has improved in recent years. Yet access can be further improved, and serious issues remain concerning the quality of those goods and services, particularly in education and housing infrastructure. Moreover, access increases with parental education and income or assets, reflecting low intergenerational mobility in many countries in the region. As with poverty reduction, most of the progress in equality of access since 2000 has come in the Southern Cone and the Andean regions, while many of Central America's countries managed only small improvements. There are also severe differences at the subnational level and between urban and rural areas, highlighting the need to strengthen the capacity of local governments to deliver high quality basic services to all their citizens.
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Successful entrepreneurs are individuals who transform ideas into profitable commercial enterprises. This process often requires special talents, including a capacity to innovate, to introduce new products, and to explore new markets.
... See More + It also requires an ability to manage others, to assign priorities to tasks to increase the efficiency of production, and to make the best use of available resources. But these talents are not enough. Successful entrepreneurs thrive in favorable economic and institutional environments that enhance the expected returns of innovation. When an enabling environment exists, entrepreneurs take risks and invest in innovation, spurring productivity gains through the dynamics of firm entry and exit and innovation by incumbent firms, thus fostering economic development. Entrepreneurs are key actors in the transformation of low-income societies characterized by low productivity and often subsistence self-employment into dynamic economies characterized by innovation and a rising number of well-remunerated workers. To the extent that causal links from entrepreneurship to productivity growth are at work, there is room for using policy levers to quicken the development process by improving the incentives and supportive institutions that facilitate innovation by entrepreneurs. These analytical and policy issues motivate this report, which explores the challenges faced by potential high-growth, transformational entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).
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This issue focuses on a regional study and technical assistance initiative to strengthen climate adaptation planning for small and medium-sized cities in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).
... See More + City planners and mayors in LAC are witnessing higher population growth in small and medium-sized cities (SMSC) than in large cities and capitals where numbers have stabilized or decreased in the past years. Rapid urbanization is often accompanied by spatial expansion and urban sprawl into hazard-prone areas such as floodplains and landslide-prone hillsides and mountain slopes. This development trend in SMSC increases the vulnerability of new settlements to climate-related impacts such as heavy rain and storm surge. To better understand the SMSC's climate risks, strengthen their adaptive capacities, increase knowledge exchange, and develop decision-making resources, the World Bank LAC disaster risk management and urban development team implemented a multi-faceted five-city pilot program to deliver technical assistance to conduct urban risk assessments and to develop city adaptation plans. This brief provides an overview of the program, outcome, and practical tools to perform risk assessments and prioritize adaptation investments.
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Ratings for the Regional Sustainable Transport and Air Quality Project for Latin America were as follows: outcomes were moderately satisfactory; risk to global environment outcome was low or negligible; Bank performance was moderately satisfactory and borrower performance was also moderately satisfactory.
... See More + Some lessons learned includes: the experience gained under this operation raises a series of questions regarding the most appropriate way of structuring regional or umbrella type projects. The implementing agency needs to be capable of exercising its implementation capacity since the grant/loan effectiveness. Trying to strengthen and build the implementation agency while in parallel trying to advance execution is not recommendable and inevitably leads to delays in project implementation. Additionally, ensuring cross-fertilization and effective coordination between projects can be extremely challenging, particularly when resources, both human and financial, are restricted. Functions endowed on the 'coordinating body', including information sharing, dissemination, institutional strengthening, monitoring and evaluation are often too broad when compared to budget availability, making operating costs often higher than expected.
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Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR2719 DEC 20, 2013
Since the 1990s, financial systems around the world, and especially those in developing countries, have gained in soundness, depth, and diversity, prompted in part by a series of financial sector and macroeconomic reforms aimed at fostering a market-driven economy in which finance plays a central role.
... See More + Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has been one of the regions at the forefront of these changes, and it serves as a good laboratory for seeing where the challenges in financial development lie. The progress in financial development in LAC no doubt reflects governments' substantial efforts to provide an enabling environment. This includes lower macroeconomic volatility, more independent and better anchored currencies, increased financial liberalization, lower currency mismatches and foreign debt exposures, enhanced effectiveness of regulation and supervision, and notable improvements in the underlying market infrastructure. This book studies the recent history of financial sector development and reforms in the LAC region and compares it to other developing and developed countries to shed light on the key obstacles to financial development, both past and future. This study is particularly timely in the wake of the global financial crisis that began in 2008, as assumptions about the underpinnings of efficient and well-functioning markets undergo close scrutiny. This book builds on and complements several overview studies on financial development both in LAC and in the developing world more broadly that have been published in the past decade, including those by the World Bank. It covers additional aspects of the financial development process and focuses on the broader set of LAC countries. The chapters in this book cover different issues related to financial development in LAC. Chapters one through five attempt to ascertain where the region's financial development lies, analyzing in detail some of the reasons and policy implications underlying its gaps in banking depth and equity liquidity, as well as the links between financial development and financial globalization. Chapters six and seven consider two themes that are central to the region's financial development: long-term finance and the role of the state in risk bearing. Chapters eight through eleven deal with regulation and supervision, first taking stock of the progress in the region and then analyzing the challenges LAC faces on three main facets of systemic oversight: macro prudential policy, micro systemic regulation, and systemic supervision.
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Publication 83498 DEC 17, 2013
Didier, Tatiana; Schmukler, Sergio L.; Anginer, Deniz; Auqui, Martin; Calderon, Cesar; Ceballos, Francisco; Cortes, Mariano; De la Torre, Augusto; D'Hulster, Katia; Dijkman, Miquel; Feyen, Erik; Gutierrez, Eva; Heysen, Socorro; Ize, Alain; Levy-Yeyati, Eduardo; Peria, Maria Soledad Martinez; Raddatz, Claudio; Seelig, Steven A.; Serven, Luis; Williams, Thomas
This report contributes to the design and implementation of policies that promote healthy living in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), thus effectively preventing premature mortality from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the region.
... See More + It examines the health and economic impact of NCDs in the region and the governance challenges in the design and implementation of multisectoral policies to prevent these conditions, including polices to improve diet, increase physical activity, and reduce tobacco use and alcohol abuse. The study focuses on how policy decisions involving multisectoral interventions to prevent health risk factors are taken, which stakeholders directly or indirectly participate in those decisions, which incentives they experience, and what strategies they use in these processes. This document is divided into six chapters: 1) non-communicable diseases in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2) risk factors for NCDs in Latin America and the Caribbean, 3) economic impact of NCDs in Latin America and the Caribbean, 4) governance of multisectoral interventions to promote healthy living: international examples, 5) multisectoral interventions to promote healthy living in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 6) lessons learned and agenda for the future. See Less -
This paper studies the impact of gender and ethnicity on educational outcomes using cross-country evidence from Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.
... See More + It uses the Minnesota Population Center's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International database, which includes individual-level data from large, harmonized, and representative samples of country censuses. Using an estimation method analogous to difference-in-differences, the paper finds that gender-based differences in literacy, primary school completion, and secondary school completion are larger for minority ethnic groups compared with others or, alternatively, ethnicity-based differences are larger for women compared with men. The findings suggest that the intersection of gender and ethnicity confers cumulative disadvantage for minority groups, especially in Latin America. The paper discusses the implications of these findings on the design of, targeting in, and resource allocation for development programs.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6734 DEC 01, 2013
Tas, Emcet O.; Reimao, Maira Emy; Orlando, Maria Beatriz
Over the past decade, 12 of 14 Latin American countries have experienced a reduction in inequality. Based on a series of counterfactual simulations, the observed changes in inequality are decomposed in order to identify the main determinants of inequality.
... See More + In contrast to methods that focus on aggregate summary statistics, the method adopted in this paper generates counterfactual distributions, so that the analysis can account for changes related to demographics, occupation, labor earnings and transfers, pensions, and other nonlabor income sources. The results show that for the majority of countries in the sample, the most important contributor to the observed decline in inequality has been the relatively strong growth in labor earnings at the bottom of the income distribution. In particular, most of the reduction in inequality can be attributed to an increase in earnings per hour for the bottom of the income distribution. The paper also contributes to the literature on inequality in Latin America by providing the Shapley-Shorrocks value of this decomposition.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6715 DEC 01, 2013
A scenario with higher oil prices has important implications for diverting from oil-based technologies to renewables, as well as gas, coal, and nuclear alternatives.
... See More + By 2030, energy demand in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is expected to double from 2008 levels. A key issue is deciding on the most appropriate mix of fuels for power generation, given the various prices of energy sources and technologies, as well as availability of renewable energy. The study's broad aim is to evaluate the impact of higher oil prices on the cost of generating electricity in countries of the LAC region so that better-informed energy policy planners can buffer future adverse effects. The study defines high oil prices as those above United States (U.S.) $100 per barrel. This price is considered a reasonable starting point for discussion given the recent range in oil prices, which averaged $95 a barrel in 2011. A price of $150 per barrel is defined as considerably high yet plausible given historical and current price levels, available forecasts, and other potential price drivers. The study's specific objectives are to: (i) analyze the economic effects of higher oil prices on LAC countries, particularly oil importers; (ii) assess the short-term impact on electricity generation costs based on the composition of generation matrices across countries of the region; and (iii) quantify the long term impact on electricity costs if countries modify the composition of their generation matrices in response to higher oil prices. This report is organized as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two presents the framework for analyzing the impact of higher oil prices, including an overview of recent price trends, major drivers of oil and gas prices, and a medium-term scenario under which higher prices might occur. Chapter three analyzes the impact of higher oil prices on LAC countries. Chapter four focuses on the short-term impact of higher oil prices on the electricity sector and the potential impact on the cost of generation, depending on the planning decisions made for future electricity generation. Finally, chapter five offers policy makers recommendations on the relevance of considering the potential impact of higher oil prices on countries' fiscal and trade balances, the cost of electricity to final consumers, and the impact that such cost may have on the competitiveness of their productive sector.
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Working Paper 85008 DEC 01, 2013
Yepez-Garcia, Rigoberto Ariel; Portes, Luis San Vicente; Garcia, Luis Enrique
Entrepreneurship is a critical process in a dynamic capitalist economy. It generates new productive capacities, processes, and goods; promotes innovation; and fosters employment creation, growth, and development.
... See More + It cuts across many disciplines, including psychology, the theory of production, labor economics, talent economics, risk theory, and public policy. Public policies in Latin America and elsewhere that seeks to promote entrepreneurship should aim to engage the middle class and the lower parts of the income distribution. This book looks at the potential but also the limits of policies to promote entrepreneurship as a main vehicle for social mobility across broad social segments of society as well as steps to remove the resource constraints that hamper entrepreneurship in areas such as credit markets and education. This volume assesses the relevant literature on entrepreneurship and connects it with new developments in the analysis of the middle class and social mobility. The first chapter gives overview and policy implications. Chapter two undertakes a review of the economic literature on entrepreneurship and relates it to the economic and sociological literature on middle class and social mobility. Chapter three describes Latin American middle-class entrepreneurs and their firms. The role played by entrepreneurship in fostering intergenerational social and economic mobility is the topic of chapter four. The role of values in shaping the choice of becoming an entrepreneur is further pursued in chapter five. Chapter six explores the role that social capital plays in the dynamism of firms in Ecuador.
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Publication 83153 NOV 25, 2013
Lora, Eduardo; Castellani, Francesca; Solimano, Andres; Kantis, Hugo D.; Federico, Juan S.; Trajtenberg, Luis A.; Velez-Grajales, Viviana; Velez-Grajales, Roberto; Anchorena, Jose; Ronconi, Lucas; Ordenana, Xavier; Arteaga, Elizabeth
This volume is devoted to an assessment of the performance and selected aspects of the management and pedagogical practices of Fe y Alegria, a federation of Jesuit schools serving approximately one million children in 20 countries, mostly in Latin America.
... See More + The available quantitative evidence suggests that the federation's schools often do reach the poor, and that students in Fe y Alegria schools tend to perform as well on test scores, if not slightly better than comparable students in other schools. Qualitative data and case studies suggest that the factors that lead to good performance are complex and related not only to the types of 'inputs' or resources used by the schools in the education process, but also to the management of these resources, and the ability to implement and test innovative programs. Other factors that support this argument include the capacity and flexibility to implement and test innovative programs that take into account the local realities.
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During the past decade countries in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have lifted more than 50 million people out of poverty, yet half of the rural population in the region still lacks access to sanitation and approximately 20 percent to drinking water.
... See More + In January 2012, policy makers, scholars, and practitioners from nine LAC countries came together in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to explore the opportunities and challenges of integrating in a more systematic and sustainable way the promotion of hygiene and sanitation behavioral change into water and sanitation investments. During the conference in Santo Domingo, it became evident that a common understanding is currently emerging from most countries in the sense that infrastructure by itself will not solve the global problems of inadequate access to improved sanitation and potable water, unless people adopt new behaviors. Therefore, there is a need to spread learning on best practices to implement cost effective water, sanitation and hygiene models, which bring about change at home and in the community at scale. This paper highlights key issues that arose in presentations and group discussions during the conference, which, can lead to substantial improvements in the provision of a multi-sector approach to hindering sustainable water and sanitation services for all.
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UNDP-Water & Sanitation Program 85189 NOV 01, 2013
During the past decade countries in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have lifted more than 50 million people out of poverty, yet half of the rural population in the region still lacks access to sanitation and approximately 20 percent to drinking water.
... See More + In January 2012, policy makers, scholars, and practitioners from nine LAC countries came together in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to explore the opportunities and challenges of integrating in a more systematic and sustainable way the promotion of hygiene and sanitation behavioral change into water and sanitation investments. During the conference in Santo Domingo, it became evident that a common understanding is currently emerging from most countries in the sense that infrastructure by itself will not solve the global problems of inadequate access to improved sanitation and potable water, unless people adopt new behaviors. Therefore, there is a need to spread learning on best practices to implement cost effective water, sanitation and hygiene models, which bring about change at home and in the community at scale. This paper highlights key issues that arose in presentations and group discussions during the conference, which, can lead to substantial improvements in the provision of a multi-sector approach to hindering sustainable water and sanitation services for all.
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UNDP-Water & Sanitation Program 85189 NOV 01, 2013
From May 12 to 18, 2013, a delegation from the World Bank's Latin America and Caribbean Region and from three client countries visited Beijing, China to learn about the citys innovative experiences in managing its scarce water.
... See More + The main issues facing China's water resources today are water shortage, low efficiency of water use, pollution, drying up of rivers and lakes, soil erosion, and increased incidence of extreme events. These challenges share commonalities with those faced by several countries in the LCR region in terms of increasing agricultural pressure on water resources and the need for developing sustainable models of integrated urban water management. The key takeaways from the study visit included: (i) the importance of the role of remote sensing in water resource management, such as using evapo-transpiration to identify different land use types, constructing basin-wide water balances, and allocating water rights; (ii) the strict measurement and control of ground water used by farmers; and (iii) the highly advanced level of wastewater treatment and scientific investments in water savings technology. The delegation noted that the Chinese approach suffers from shortcomings that limit the transferability to the LAC region, namely: (i) high level of subsidization, covering operation and maintenance; and (ii) relatively low stakeholder consultation and public participation.
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The Amazon Rainforest is a global public good. As such, and given that 15 percent of the original Amazon forest area has already been lost, households worldwide might be willing to pay to reduce or avoid additional losses.
... See More + A full elicitation of global preferences for valuing preservation of the current forest, using stated-preference population surveys, would be costly and time consuming. Alternatively, this paper uses a Delphi stated-preference technique in which 48 European environmental valuation experts were asked to provide "best guesses" on the possible outcomes of population surveys in their own countries and Europe as a whole. The expert judgments indicate willingness to pay in Europe for preserving the current Amazon Rainforest of about 28 Euro per household per year on average; a slightly lower value is inferred for a plan that allows a 10 percent future reduction from the current rainforest area. The income elasticity of experts' stated willingness to pay with respect to per-capita income in their own countries is in the range 0.5-0.8. These findings indicate that Delphi studies might be used more widely as a tool for global benefit transfer.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6637 OCT 01, 2013