The following Breve provides an overview of the main challenges that societies, health care systems, and policy makers are currently facing to confront cancer. This brief analyzes the main characteristics of cancer, and shows how these influence the development of new drugs. At the same time, it looks at some of the implications for patients. It also presents some thoughts on the pharmaceutical industry related to cancer treatments.

This Breve first highlights the importance of pharmaceutical procurement policies. It then focuses on the goals of National Drug Policies. Based on these goals, it looks into the reasons for intervening in pharmaceutical markets and different forms of intervention. The subsequent sections analyze in further detail the procurement of in-patent and off-patent medicines, since there are fundamental differences in the procurement of these two medicine types.

Disruption is the new norm and the digital transformation can spur innovation growth across many activities. Emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) can help governments reduce costs while improving services. Not every emerging technology will alter the social landscape, but some truly do have the potential to disrupt the statu quo and change the way people live.

Recent years have seen an ever-greater expansion of the digital economy, a development that may bring new opportunities to workers who were at a disadvantage in the traditional economy. We focus on a specific set of workers who belong to such a group: women. We study a skill set of particular relevance in the digital economy and estimate their returns in the labor market, according to gender, across four Latin American countries.

The important debate about how economic fluctuations affect employment reallocation in heterogeneous businesses is currently open in the literature. This debate is relevant as it matters for the understanding of the labor market dynamics, and for devising labor policies that aim at dampening employment fluctuations. The theoretical literature suggests that job-to-job flows reallocate workers from low productivity to high productivity firms and often this pattern is tested assuming that firm size, wages and productivity are positively related.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are important anti-poverty programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. There is little evidence, however, of the effectiveness of ongoing CCT programs several years after they have begun. Such evidence is particularly relevant for policymakers because program effects may become larger, as with the operational cycle, or smaller, if enthusiasm on the part of the beneficiaries or the program team wanes. We analyze whether children exposed since birth to a CCT in El Salvador have better outcomes at initial school ages.

Inequality in Latin America fell substantially in the early 2000s. In this paper, we take advantage of administrative matched employee-employed data in Brazil, Chile and Ecuador to examine whether these inequality trends held in the formal sector, as well. We document a significant decrease in the log variance of earnings in Brazil and Ecuador in the early 2000s, whereas inequality in Chile between 2008 and 2015 remained largely flat. In this context, we find that inequality among salaried workers is largely a between-firm phenomenon across these three countries.