Renewed interest in the Primary Health Care-PHC agenda is a common element of the majority of recent health system reforms throughout Latin America and the Caribbean-LAC. Strengthening of PHC has been recognized as a promising solution to address the major challenges the Region's health systems face. As governments are making substantive long term investments in PHC oriented healthcare reforms, there is a requirement for accountability and increased transparency and reporting on the results of these initiatives.

Peru's Ministry of Education has partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and LEGO Education to develop a program that helps children improve their ability to solve scientific problems using a set of curriculum materials that is affordable and can be brought to a national scale. Working in teams on problems that capture their interest, students devise solutions, reflect on what they build while solving the problem, and apply what they have learned to new challenges. This brief describes a pilot initiative and its evaluation design and baseline.

International headlines often focus on the drama of U.S.- Mexico border, but the borders of Latin America are becoming more active transit points for work across the region. Today, migration officials are noting labor movements inconceivable as little as 15 years ago: Hondurans and Guatemalans crossing to El Salvador for agriculture and construction work; Bolivians and Paraguayans working in large numbers in Argentina; Mexicans from the state of Chiapas moving to the Yucatan for work, with Guatemalans replacing them to harvest local crops.

This paper uses matched social security and program micro data from the Uruguayan Plan de Atención Nacional a la Emergencia Social to investigate the effect of social assistance on formal labor market outcomes. One specific feature of this program is that households could gain and retain eligibility only conditional on their formal income being below a predetermined level. Using a regression discontinuity estimator, we show that, consistent with a textbook model of labor supply, the program reduced formal employment and earnings, primarily among men.

This paper analyzes the correlation between the expansion of the Mexican Conditional Cash Transfer program Oportunidades and the evolution of the labor market over the period 2000-10. We find no evidence of perverse effects. Program expansion was not associated with drops in either labor force participation or wageformality. On the contrary, the expansion of Oportunidades was strongly correlated with a transition from informal wage employment to self-employment for men (by 1.6% and 0.6% of total employment in rural and urban municipalities respectively).