CONTENTS I.Virtual water: the solution to water shortage? II. Environmental probes derailed by NAFTA nations.III.Why exactly does the NAFTA CEC (Commission for Environmental Co-operation) exist?IV. An alliance for global water security in the 21st Century.V. Canada and the US make plans to restore the Great Lakes. VI. International Joint Commission recommends protecting Great Lakes Basin waters.VII. Major breakthrough for water quality and management in Europe.Thestatements and opinions reported in this Newsletter do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or official positions of the Uni…
Background
The mandate for gender mainstreaming underpins the comprehensive provisions of the Beijing Platform for Action which itself finds continuity with the concern for the development of institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women contained in the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies.
Governments in the Caribbean have attempted in various ways to advance gender equity not only through substantive policy but also through administrative reform. In these attempts, governments have both made progress and confronted conceptual and operational difficulties. The United Nations
mid-term r…
This article analyses the behaviour of the Colombian labour market and the changes it underwent during the 1990s. It begins by outlining the reforms carried out in that country and summarizing macroeconomic developments and changes in the production structure in the 1990s. Then it uses data available from household surveys to analyse the dynamic of the labour market by economic sector, educational level and occupational position. After briefly describing the latest advances in research into income distribution in Colombia, it then shows the results of simulation exercises carried out to determ…
La edición 1999 del Anuario estadístico de América
Latina y el Caribe contiene una selección actualizada a comienzos de diciembre de las principales series
estadísticas disponibles sobre la evolución económica
y social de los países de la región. Representa un
sistemático esfuerzo de la División de Estadística y
Proyecciones de la CEPAL, orientado a homogeneizar
las cifras y a hacerlas internacionalmente comparables. uarios en forma oportuna.
La primera parte comprende indicadores
socioeconómicos derivados (tasas de crecimiento,
proporciones o coeficientes), que representan una visión
resumida…
Document prepared by the secretariat of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) for the Regional Meeting on Information Technology for Development (Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 20-21 June 2000).…
Although most of the total population and the majority of the people living in poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean are in urban centres, poverty is, in relative terms, still a rural phenomenon in the region. The incidence of poverty and of extreme poverty is much larger in rural areas than in urban settings. As recently as 1997, more than half of all rural households were living in poverty, and close to a third of them were in extreme poverty conditions. Moreover, the fragile economic situation of most countries in the region during the past two years may well have worsened those figure…
The external trade of a country is closely linked with its geographical location, with the transport services that cover the distance to markets, and the ports through which that trade passes. Recent advances in maritime transport, the growing international economic integration, and the privatization of ports in the countries on the Pacific coast of South America have given rise to expectations that ports could be developed that concentrate both domestic cargo and that of neighbouring countries for its subsequent redistribution: what are known as hub ports . The main conclusion of t…
Most educational investment is based on untested or partially tested assumptions about the cost-effectiveness of a given course of action. Indeed, the only estimates that have been available have been for the average profitability of each type of education, even though these differ greatly from marginal profitability. This article sets out a new approach to estimating the cost-effectiveness of educational investment. The authors canvassed the views of ten world-renowned educational researchers on the likely impact on students' learning achievements of a set of forty measures generally reg…
Introducción
During the 1990s the market for Latin America's debt grew in volume, types of instruments traded and number of investors and trade houses involved. Investors were drawn by high growthpotential and high yields in most Latin American countries, as well as by a general trend towards the implementation of economic and political reforms. As a result, the relative size of Latin America's market worldwide grew.This growth, however, was affected by a series of market events that underscored Latin America's vulnerability to financial shocks. Growth in trading volumes and ass…
The government of Cuba established a tax regime for micro-enterprises as soon as it legalized the sector in 1993. It was designed to function in a difficult context in which a tax-paying culture did not exist, in which widespread noncompliance was feared, and in which some micro-entrepreneurs' incomes were high. The tax regime included advance monthly lump-sum payments, a 10% maximum amount of total revenues which could be deducted as costs in calculating taxable income, and an escalating tax schedule. This tax regime has a number of weaknesses which make it inequitable, inefficient and i…
From the early decades of the twentieth century onward, the level of equity achieved in Uruguay, and the sophistication of its social welfare institutions, set the country apart from the rest of Latin America. In the second half of the century, this heritage of democracy and equity survived the severe tests to which it was subjected without fracturing too badly. The strength of the country's sociocultural foundations was convincingly demonstrated after the restoration of democracy in 1985, when Uruguay succeeded in maintaining the position it had traditionally held as the regional leader …