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After an extensive consultative process with governments and global partners, including civil society organizations and bilateral and multilateral organizations, the World Bank's new health, nutrition, and population strategy aims to help developing countries strengthen their health systems and improve the health and well-being of millions of the world's poorest people, boost economic growth, reduce poverty caused by catastrophic illness, and provide the structural "glue" that supports multiple health-related programs within countries."--BOOK JACKET.
This book analyzes teacher quality in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is the key to faster education progress. Based on new research in 15,000 classrooms in seven different countries, it documents the sources of low teacher quality and distills the global evidence on practical policies that can help the region produce "great teachers."
This book looks at both the potential and limits of policies to promote entrepreneurship as an important vehicle for social mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean. Who are the region's entrepreneurs? They tend to be middle-aged males with secondary and, often, tertiary education who represent only a small segment of the economically active population in the six countries considered in this book. They come from families in which a parent is, or was, an entrepreneur. In fact, a parent's occupation is more important in the decision to become an entrepreneur than a parent's wealth, income or education. Middle class entrepreneurship tends to dominate the sample in part since this is the majo...
This report summarize the experience since 2008 of the global efforts coordinated by the World Bank to use National Health Accounts (NHA) to better assess sources and allocation of public, donor and private health expenditures and inform countries' health financing policies.
Great progress has been made in recent years in securing better access and financial protection against the cost of illness through collective financing of health care. Managing scarce resources effectively and efficiently is an important part of this story. Experience has shown that, without strategic policies and focused spending, the poor are likely to get left out. The use of purchasing to enhance public sector performance is well-documented in other sectors. Extension to the health sector of lessons from this experience is now successfully implemented in many developing countries. Public.
This study highlights the interaction between social protection (SP) programs and labor markets in the Latin America region. It presents new evidence on the limited coverage of existing programs and emphasizes the challenges caused by high informality for achieving universal social protection for old age income, health, unemployment risks and anti-poverty safety nets. It identifies interaction effects between SP programs and the behavioral responses of workers, firms and social protection providers, which can further undermine efforts to expand coverage, summarizing evidence from recent work across the region. The book argues for a re-design of financing to eliminate cross subsidies between ...
This book combines an institutional political economy approach to policy making with social network analysis of social policy formulation processes. Based on extensive interviews with governmental and nongovernmental actors, the case studies of social policy formulation in Argentina, The Bahamas, Bolivia, and Trinidad and Tobago show that while societal actors are central in the networks in South American countries, government officials are the main participants in the Caribbean countries. The comparative analysis of the networks of ideas, information, economic resources, and political power across these cases indicates that differences in the types of bureaucratic systems and governance structures may explain the diversity of actors with decision power and the resources used to influence social policy formulation across the region. These analytical and methodological contributions-combined with specific examples of policies and programs-will help to enhance the efficiency, efficacy, and sustainability of public policies in the social arena.
Workers' remittances have become a major source of financing for developing countries and are especially important in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is at the top of the ranking of remittance receiving regions in the world. While there has been a recent surge in analytical work on the topic, this book is motivated by the large heterogeneity in migration and remittance patterns across countries and regions, and by the fact that existing evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean is restricted to only a few countries, such as Mexico and El Salvador. Because the nature of the phenomenon varies across countries, its development impact and policy implications are also likely to differ i...
A growing number of cities around the world have established systems for monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective information with subjective opinions and cover a wide variety of topics. This book assesses a method that takes advantage of both types of information and offers criteria to identify and rank the issues of potential importance for urban dwellers. This method which combines the so-called 'hedonic price' and 'life satisfaction' approaches to value public goods was tested in pilot studies in six Latin American cities: Bogot , Buenos Aires, Lima, Medell n, Montevideo, and San Jos of Costa Rica. It provides valuable insights to address key question...
Does what economies export matter for development? If so, can industrial policies improve on the export basket generated by the market? This book approaches these questions from a variety of conceptual and policy viewpoints. Reviewing the theoretical arguments in favor of industrial policies, the authors first ask whether existing indicators allow policy makers to identify growth-promoting sectors with confidence. To this end, they assess, and ultimately cast doubt upon, the reliability of many popular indicators advocated by proponents of industrial policy. Second, and central to their critique, the authors document extraordinary differences in the performance of countries exporting seeming...