This study combines detailed datasets on 39.1 million hospital discharges in six countries in Latin America and the Caribbean with summary statistics for the remaining countries in the region in order to estimate the number and economic effect of avoidable hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions in the region. We estimated the number of avoidable hospitalizations to be in a range between 8.1 and 10 million, with both visible costs of attention and hidden costs of opportunity representing as high as 2.5% of the reported total health expenditure in 2009.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become the main social assistance interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), reaching 129 million individuals in 18 countries in 2010. Programs shared key characteristics such as the payment of cash grants and the incorporation of co-responsibilities, but varied greatly in terms of coverage, infrastructure, routines, and even objectives.

Seguro Popular (SP) was introduced in 2002 to provide health insurance to the 50 million Mexicans without Social Security. This paper tests whether the program has had unintended consequences, distorting workers' incentives to operate in the informal sector. The analysis examines the impact of SP on disaggregated labor market decisions, taking into account that program coverage depends not only on the individual's employment status, but also on that of other household members.

Providing unemployment insurance is particularly problematic in countries with high informality because workers can claim unemployment benefits and work in the informal sector at the same time. This paper proposes a method to evaluate alternative schemes to provide insurance for unemployed individuals. First, it presents an economy that can be calibrated to reproduce key features of the economy for which the reform will be evaluated. Then, it shows how the implementation of an unemployment insurance savings account (UISA) scheme can be evaluated.