On June 7, 2010, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) hosted an expert seminar in Washington DC entitled "An Even Start: Numeracy Education in Latin America and the Caribbean." The seminar aimed to share some of the initiatives implemented under the IDB's Numeracy initiative, which is focused on implementing policies to help children reach their full potential in mathematics and the natural science.

Teen mothers in Latin America complete 1.8 to 2.8 fewer years of education than Latin American women who delay bearing children. Pregnancy is often believed to be the reason why girls drop out of school.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is an educational program that aims at deploying millions of rugged, ultra low-cost, individually connected laptop computers to the majority of children in developing nations that today lack access to such devices.

Unemployment benefit systems are nonexistent in many developing economies. Introducing such systems poses many challenges, which are partly due to the high level of informality in the labor markets of these economies. This paper studies the consequences on the labor market of implementing an unemployment benefit system in economies with large informal sectors and high flows of workers between formality and informality.

We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium search and matching model with salaried employment and informal self-employment to analyze the implications of introducing universal unemployment protection for informal workers through transfers, which are conditional on participation in training programs. We study how changes in unemployment benefits (UB) for unemployed workers in training programs (training UB), modify labor market outcomes for the unemployed.