Tanto en los estudios de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) como en los realizados por la Oficina Regional de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO, por sus siglas en inglés) había quedado de manifiesto la preocupación por los efectos de la volatilidad de los precios internacionales en las cadenas de valor de granos básicos en Centroamérica, situación que dio origen a esta investigación.
El objetivo del documento es contribuir al diseño de una metodología que permita estudiar los arreglos institucionales determinantes de la…
This report updates the analysis set out in the Preliminary Overview of Latin America and the Caribbean 2013,
released in December 2013, on the basis of official data published by the countries in the region in the subsequent
months, and presents a revised economic outlook for 2014. In addition, it examines the external factors influencing
the region’s performance and their impact on the different components of the balance of payments and summarizes
the challenges and main trends in relation to monetary, exchange-rate and fiscal policy. It confirms the deceleration
of growth analysed in the Pr…
En este informe se actualiza el análisis presentado en el Balance Preliminar de las Economías de América Latina y el Caribe 2013 (publicado en diciembre de 2013), sobre la base de los datos oficiales de los países de la región que fueron difundidos en los meses siguientes, y se revisan las perspectivas del desempeño económico del año en curso. Además, se presentan los factores externos que incidieron en el desempeño regional y su impacto en los diferentes componentes de la balanza de pagos y se resumen los retos y tendencias principales de las políticas monetaria, cambiaria y fiscal. Se confir…
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has been a pioneer in the field of disaster
assessment and in the development and dissemination of a disaster assessment methodology. Its approach involves
estimating the effects of a disaster on assets (damage) and economic flows (losses and additional costs) and takes
account of the economic, social and environmental impacts of disasters.
ECLAC studies in this area respond to the need to estimate the financial costs of a disaster with a view to
determining the amount of sector-specific funding needed for recovery and reconst…
This report is part of a series of national case studies aimed at disseminating knowledge on the current status of social protection systems in Latin American and Caribbean countries, and at discussing their main challenges in terms of realizing of the economic and social rights of the population and achieving key development goals, such as combating poverty and hunger.…
En el presente documento se describe la política y estrategia de evaluación de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL). El objetivo de esta política y estrategia es fortalecer la función de evaluación, aumentando al máximo la transparencia y la coherencia y asegurando un alto nivel de calidad en las evaluaciones. Se espera que esto, a su vez, contribuya en última instancia a una mayor rendición de cuentas y mejor desempeño y aprendizaje institucional en la CEPAL. La política de la Comisión se ha establecido de conformidad con el Reglamento y Reglamentación de la Secreta…
The document which ECLAC presents on this occasion explores further the theme of equality addressed at the two previous sessions of the Commission, in Time for Equality: Closing Gaps, Opening Trails (2010, Brasilia), and Structural Change for Equality: An Integrated Approach to Development (2012, San Salvador).
The document prepared for the thirty-fifth session, entitled Compacts for Equality: Towards a Sustainable Future, discusses the two major challenges to development in Latin America and the Caribbean today: to achieve greater equality and to make development sustainable for future genera…
El documento que la CEPAL da a conocer en esta ocasión profundiza en la línea de la igualdad de los presentados en sus dos anteriores períodos de sesiones: La hora de la igualdad: brechas por cerrar, caminos por abrir (2010, Brasilia), y Cambio estructural para la igualdad: Una visión integrada del desarrollo (2012, El Salvador).
Bajo el título Pactos para la igualdad: hacia un futuro sostenible, el actual documento de posición plantea los dos grandes retos que enfrenta el desarrollo en América Latina y el Caribe: lograr mayores grados de igualdad y procurar sostenibilidad en la dinámica del d…
Cloud computing is not a stand-alone technology, but rather a mix of a large set of various technologies. Although based upon previous trajectories, recent progress in virtualization, storage, connectivity and processing have come together to create a new ecosystem. The result is a new paradigm extremely attractive from an economic perspective due to its capability to combine cost saving with increased flexibility to manage the ICT needs of firms. The main characteristics of cloud computing are as follows: High degree of abstraction of the user from the physical and technological characteristi…
This paper analyses the viability, implications and challenges of expanding the Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR) to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Paraguay. A regional reserve fund should be viewed as one of a broad range of mechanisms offered by the international financial architecture to address balance-of-payment difficulties. A fund with resources of between US$ 9 and US$ 10 billion at its disposal would be able to cover the potential funding needs of its members in the most likely scenarios, without necessarily becoming the lender of last resort for all its members. In more extrem…
The Human Development Index (HDI) is an indicator designed to track the development of countries in respect of three dimensions of development: health, education and income. Since it was first published in 1990, great efforts have been made to improve hdi, which, as has been stressed on numerous occasions, cannot be seen as a definitive measure of development. This paper includes a reflection on what constitutes human development, the pillars underpinning it and two new dimensions that should be incorporated into hdi (employment and political freedoms) for it to better express progress in deve…
This study draws on household survey results spanning a period of three decades in length to analyse young people's entry into the labour market in 10 Latin American countries. It finds that: (i) the employment status of young people had deteriorated over time until seeing an improvement in the late 2000s, although youth unemployment and informality rates are still very high; (ii) young people are entering into a typical employment cycle in which they are surpassing the results obtained by adults of earlier generations. Informality is not a part of this pattern, however, indicating the ex…
Evidence suggests that labour markets do not clear as posited by conventional microeconomics. The enduring inter-industry wage differentials (IIWD) and employer-size wage differentials (ESWD) present a challenge. Data from the Jamaican private sector reveal that eswd could be the impetus for IIWD. After accounting for labour quality and other characteristics, employers with 10 to 49 employees and 50 or more employees pay estimated premiums of 14.3% and 22.9%, respectively. After estimating the differences in tenure profiles, the premium associated with the largest employer size was reduced to …
Despite its importance, the literature on wage differentials between public- and private-sectors employees in Latin America is sparse. This article analyses the wage gap between the two sectors in Chile, based on monthly longitudinal data obtained from the Social Protection Survey (EPS) for the period 2002-2009. The study takes advantage of the panel structure of the data to control for time-invariant observable and unobservable factors that determine the self-selection of workers between sectors and wages. The results show that the wage differential between workers in the public and private s…
This paper provides empirical evidence to assess the impact of socioeconomic and political variables on different measures of income inequality based on the 27 units of the Brazilian federation in the period from 1999 to 2008. The Brazilian experience is a good example for understanding the income inequality policies in developing countries. The findings suggest that the improvement observed along the period under analysis is a result of the combination of increased trade openness, technological and financial development, a reduction in the unemployment rate, the adoption of social policies th…
This study uses the capability approach to undertake a multidimensional analysis of deprivation in urban areas of Brazil between 2003 and 2008 based on a four-dimensional index (living conditions, health, level of education and participation in the labour market) constructed out of 13 different indicators. Its findings indicate that a majority of the population is living in households that are not experiencing deprivation and that, of those that are, the instance of deprivation is confined to a single indicator. When the results were then compared with the income-poverty index for the differen…
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effects of the Bolsa Família family conditional cash transfer programme (PBF) on beneficiary families' spending on food, fruit, meat and fish, poultry and eggs, green vegetables, cereals and oilseed products, flours and pastas, tuber and root vegetables, sugar, bakery products, alcoholic beverages, education, hygiene, health and school utensils. The estimation was based on microdata obtained from the 2008-2009 Brazilian Household Budget Survey; and the propensity-score matching methodology was used to calculate the average effect of the treatment o…
A variety of methodologies, such as the Foreign Trade Competitiveness Index, the Foreign Trade Policy Index and the Tradecan competitiveness matrix, reveal a process of adaptation to changes in world trade in the period from 2002 to 2012, within the context of the so-called complex adaptive system as a transition from the fourth to the fifth technological revolution in fresh asparagus exports from Peru. The country's competitiveness map shows that it is not competing globally at the international level but rather partially or regionally. Mexico is its main competitor, with com…
This article deals with the interaction between supply chains and territory, identifying two types of development: the enclave type of the rain-fed farming economy in the inland area known as the Secano Interior, and the potential linkage between this enclave and the greater metropolitan area of Concepción. The benefits of the forestry and cellulose supply chain, which is of global importance, are not spreading through its territory, which remains underdeveloped. Greater Concepción, the country's second most important industrial conurbation, has not succeeded in es…
This edition of the FAL Bulletin aims to present and encourage the use of the economic infrastructure investment database for Latin America and the Caribbean (EII-LAC-DB), built by the Infrastructure Services Unit of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). The information contained refers to the period 1980-2012, in keeping with measurements undertaken by the World Bank, ECLAC and under the cooperation agreement between ECLAC and the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF).…