International Policy Lessons: Integrated Report

As part of the activities of the Joint Program “Support for the development of an Integrated National Financing Framework for SDGs in Cuba” (CIFFRA), a comprehensive review of international policy lessons was carried out in four development financing key areas: (i) export promotion; (ii) attraction and channeling of foreign direct investment (FDI); (iii) promotion of science, technology and innovation (STI); and (iv) governance and public investment. Five reports were drawn up and two compilations with 11 case studies on policies to promote exports and attract FDI by international consultants.…

Addressing Water Security in the Caribbean

Final assessment report. Assessment of the United Nations Road Safety Fund (UNRSF) project: Speed management in Latin America: the case of Argentina

CIFFRA: methodological summary

The Joint Program “Support for the development of an Integrated National Framework for Financing the SDGs in Cuba” or CIFFRA is part of the more than 70 international experiences promoted by the United Nations system to finance the 2030 Agenda. The implementation of CIFFRA required a process of learning, assimilation, and innovation, given the peculiarities of the Cuban economy and the realization of the project in the midst of the crisis caused by COVID-19. This report describes in detail the process followed to carry out the project, summarizing the key milestones, lessons, challenges, and c…

New narratives for rural transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean: towards a renewed measurement and classification of rural areas

Rural areas have experienced major economic, social, demographic and cultural transformations in recent decades. Rurality is no longer synonymous with agriculture, and heightened interactions between rural and urban areas have had a significant impact on the identities of their populations and the characteristics that define those territories. In Latin America and the Caribbean, however, these transformations have remained relatively invisible to statistics and public policy because of the prevalence of dichotomous and static approaches to the measurement and characterization of rural areas. T…

Report of the Sixty-fourth meeting of the Presiding Officers of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean

45 years of the Regional Gender Agenda

First version, June 22, 2022. Forty-five years ago, the first Regional Conference on the Integration of Women into the Economic and Social Development of Latin America was held (Havana, 1977), as an intergovernmental platform for the region following the World Conference of the International Women’s Year (Mexico City, 1975). This meeting culminated in the adoption by the governments of the region of the Regional Plan of Action for the Integration of Women into Latin American Economic and Social Development, the region’s first road map for active inclusion of women in economic, political, socia…

A study on challenges and opportunities in financing Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 9 in three Caribbean countries: an exploratory analysis

This study presents an exploratory analysis of the current state of financing the implementation of quality education and resilient infrastructure in Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and Saint Lucia. The study will analyze domestic funding sources, including government budgetary resources, and foreign sources, including loans and grants. It will examine strategies the region can adopt to leverage funding at scale, such as blended finance, innovative PPPs, ESG-driven FDI and syndicated loans. The study will also examine how the countries can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of financing to…

Report of the second regional seminar on social development. Social security (pensions and health) and the protracted crisis: an opportunity to combat inequality in the framework of a welfare state in Latin America and the Caribbean

This document is the report of the Second Regional Seminar on Social Development “Social security and protracted crisis: an opportunity to combat inequality in the framework of a welfare state in Latin America and the Caribbean”. This seminar was organised by the Social Development Division of ECLAC in collaboration with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) and in partnership with the German Cooperation and the European Union’s Transitional Development Facility Project,1 and was held on 30 and 31 August and 1 September 2022. In its sec…

When RateMyProfessors met Google Scholar: students’ evaluations and professors’ looks and research

We take more than a million student evaluations of almost 200,000 professors from the RateMyProfessors website and link them with information on the research productivity of almost 3,000 professors in Google Scholar to provide a systematic characterization of the relationship between student evaluations and the characteristics of the classes, universities and professors concerned and to test whether students’ appreciations are conditionally related to research productivity. The study concludes that although how “easy” and “interesting” students consider a course to be are the most important de…

Gross fixed capital formation in the Brazilian health sector: methodology and results for 2010–2019

Health satellite accounts provide information to elucidate the interaction between the health sector and the rest of the economy. However, in Brazil these accounts have gaps, such as a lack of data on gross fixed capital formation. The aim of this article is to present a methodology to measure gross fixed capital formation in the health sector in 2010–2019 and to analyse the data thus obtained. The results show that gross fixed capital formation in the health sector is biased towards machinery and equipment rather than construction. The share of private investment increased throughout the peri…

Effects of the Continuous Benefit Programme on the nutritional status and food security of older persons in Brazil

Addressing the needs of older persons poses public-policy challenges. The obstacles that the poorest older persons face in securing their livelihoods, compounded by physiological and metabolic changes and the presence of chronic diseases, make them more vulnerable. This study evaluates the impact of the Continuous Benefit Programme (BPC) on the nutritional status and food security levels of older persons in Brazil, using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design with microdata drawn from the 2017–2018 Consumer Expenditure Survey (POF). On average, participation in the programme is found to incre…

Informality, social protection and welfare during the COVID-19 crisis in four Latin American countries

We compare the effects of labour market shocks and social policy responses on people’s welfare following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. We assess the role of formal and informal sector labour incomes and social transfers in the changes observed in the distribution of income and welfare. We worked with harmonized household survey microdata and performed a microdecomposition analysis by income source. In all four countries, the loss of earnings was the main mechanism behind the loss of income, and developments in the informal sector were crucial in…

Full dollarization versus monetary union: the case of Ecuador

This study proposes using optimum currency areas (OCA) as a theoretical basis for analysis of the full dollarization of Ecuador, viewing the country and the United States as an informal monetary union. At least two facets of this are of interest: (i) the convergence properties of inflation rates between Ecuador and the United States; and (ii) the degree of vulnerability of the Ecuadorian economy to changes in United States monetary policy. Unit roots and stationarity tests are used to study inflation rate convergence, structural vector autoregressive models are used to examine the Ecuadorian e…

CEPAL Review No. 140

The short-run consequences of the erosion of economic freedom for growth and institutions in Latin America: an unorthodox experimental review of the twenty-first century

How economic growth can be improved is a question that has always divided researchers, but it is one of the utmost importance, bearing directly on prosperity, quality of life and human well-being. The research presented here is an experimental review whose purpose is to evaluate the causal effects that the erosion of economic freedom has had on the economic growth rate, corruption, democracy, the transparency of laws, media censorship and judicial constraints in 19 Latin American countries during the twenty-first century. The results show that for each percentage point erosion of economic free…

Legal frameworks and specialized institutional frameworks for the social and solidarity economy in Latin America

This article analyses recent changes in social and solidarity economy (SSE) policies in eight Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Uruguay. It outlines the institutional rules that limited or added to States’ policymaking capacity, as well as examining progress on legislation and regulations and changes in specialized institutional frameworks. The information was obtained through an extensive review of documents and databases produced by government and academic institutions and social and solidarity economy organizations. The conclusion …

The young Raúl Prebisch and his 1919 translation of Adolph Wagner: clues to a relativist critique

This article analyses Raúl Prebisch’s earliest activities while still a young student at the University of Buenos Aires, between 1918 and 1922. One of these activities was the translation of texts by foreign economists for the university’s Revista de Ciencias Económicas, contributing to the dissemination of ideas in Argentina. We analyse Prebisch’s 1919 translation of Adolph Wagner and find indications that he modified the text, firstly by selecting for translation excerpts critical of the idea that free trade was automatically beneficial to all nations, secondly by omitting Wagner’s defence o…

Where next for Latin America? The two faces of the new Latin American capitalism

In Latin America, “islands of modernity” associated with a new biological and digital paradigm in the exploitation of natural resources and the production of services and manufactures coexist with vast segments of the population mired in insecurity, poverty, stagnation and social exclusion. This structural dualism reflects a growing gap between a modern segment of society that emulates the behaviour patterns of developed nations and a segment that lags behind, in which labour informality, basic material deprivations and rising citizen insecurity predominate. The lack of an appropriate theory o…

State aid and competition in the Dominican economy

This paper analyses the economic and social impact of a State aid programme designed to incentivize the development of the border provinces of the Dominican Republic. The intervention method chosen was based on tax exemptions, creating a possible tension between the objective of territorial cohesion and that of upholding market competition. In the competition sphere, the study analyses whether the law had the effect of increasing the market power of beneficiary companies. In the social sphere, it establishes a criterion of regional similarity and compares the evolution of the border provinces …