With the aim of guiding the work agenda on improving public health expenditure efficiency in the LAC region, the Inter-American Development Bank held a workshop entitled “Public Expenditure Efficiency and Outcomes: Application to Health, Challenges and Opportunities for Improvements in Latin America and the Caribbean” in March 2016. This document presents key discussions from the workshop, which brought together professionals in public financial management and healthcare.

The Bahamas faces critical challenges due to an increase in chronic diseases (CDs). Overweight and obesity are on the rise among all age groups. In addition, the prevalence of raised blood glucose is 13% and that of high blood pressure is 31%. CDs are responsible for 45% of deaths in the country. The Ministry of Health has been implementing programs and interventions to slow the growth of CDs. These programs focus on tackling risk factors and developing both the National Dietary Guidelines and the nutrition interventions implemented in primary care facilities and in the community.

The expansion of access to education in the region has been accompanied by greater inclusion: more poor students and those in rural areas are attending school at all levels. In pre-primary and secondary, the educational gap between rich and poor students remains large.

Recent technological innovation in fields such as robotics, automation, and machine learning have reduced the number of workers required in a range of sectors, while lowering costs and increasing reliability. This trend has led policymakers, academics, CEOs, and entrepreneurs to ask what types of jobs will be most affected, what new skillsets will be needed for the jobs of tomorrow, and how governments can ease the transition.

The location of offices of public employment services matters. It can bring jobseekers and vacancies closer together to accelerate the matching process and make the best use of resources. In the case of Brazil, financial consolidation calls for better job placement and better spending of public resources. In this line, the Labor Markets and Social Security Division (LMK) in cooperation with the Ministry of Labor developed a tool to objectively identify where offices of public employment services (PES) could be (re)located to spend resources more efficiently.

We study the determinants of math achievement among children in early elementary school using data from a unique experiment in which children were randomly assigned to classrooms within schools for four consecutive grades. As a result, each child in our sample was exposed to four separate, orthogonal shocks to the quality of teachers and peers. We first show that there are steep socioeconomic gradients and a substantial boy-girl gap in math test scores. However, among children of mothers with university education, there is no difference in the math achievement of girls and boys.

Tailoring instruction to each student’s needs can produce significant learning gains. However, few programs have successfully implemented this approach. In this paper, we present the results of a randomized evaluation of a program that uses an inquiry with an individualized scaffolding approach to teach Mathematics to preschoolers in Peru. Our results suggest that the program improves overall Mathematics outcomes, and that it has stronger impact on students in the lower quintiles of the Mathematics outcomes distribution and on students whose teachers have university degrees.

Following the seminal work of Deaton (1985), pseudo-panels (or synthetic panel) analysis has been widely used in the context of consumption and income (e.g. Deaton and Paxson, 1994; Banks, Blundell, and Brugiavini, 2001; Pencavel, 2007). In Latin America, the synthetic panel approach has been used primarily to examine income mobility (e.g. Calónico, 2006; Navarro, 2006; Ñopo, 2011; Ferreira et al., 2013).

Interventions designed to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are popular among policy makers, given the role SMEs play in job creation around the world. Business support interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often based on the assumption that market failures and institutional constraints impede the growth of SME growth. Significant resources from governments and international organizations are directed to SMEs to maximize their socioeconomic impact.