Between 2000 and 2013, Latin America has considerably reduced poverty (from 46.3% to 29.7% of the population). In this paper, we use synthetic panels to show that, despite progress, the region remains characterized by substantial vulnerability that also affects the rising middle-class. More specifically, we find that 65% of those with daily income between $4 and 10, and 14% of those in the middle-class, experience poverty at least once over a ten-year period. Furthermore, chronic poverty remains widespread (representing 91% and 50% of extreme and moderate poverty respectively).

This paper brings new evidence on the impact of The Peruvian Job Youth Training Program (Projoven). Compared with prior evaluations of the program, this one has several advantages. This is the first experimental impact evaluation of Projoven, and also the first to measure impacts over a longer period: almost three years after training. Additionally, the evaluation supplements data from a follow-up survey with administrative data from the country's Electronic Payroll (Planilla Electrónica), allowing for a more accurate measure of formal employment.

This paper provides new evidence to characterize changes in the demand for skills associated with shifts in occupations for a sample of 10 of the G20 countries, using information available from LinkedIn profiles as a new and unique source of dynamic labor market data on occupations and skills. A unique feature of LinkedIn’s data is the availability of granular measures of skill importance by country and occupation.

We use a field experiment to evaluate the impact of two informational get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns to boost female electoral participation in Paraguay. We find that public campaigns had no effect either on the probability of registration, or on voter turnout in the 2013 presidential election. However, households that received door-to-door (D2D) treatment were four percentage points more likely to vote.

El Salvador has made significant advances in education in the last decade, with more and more children going to school. But many drop out young, and those who stay in school often receive an inconsistent and inadequate education. Greater and better investment is needed to tackle both of these challenges.

Education spending has significantly increased in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over the last few decades. Most education systems in the region have improved teacher salaries, introduced programs that focus on improving learning in the most disadvantaged schools and systemic accountability. The available data suggests that increased spending combined with economic and social reforms has had an impact on educational outcomes such as improvement on primary and secondary completion rate and moderate but sustained progress in closing the learning gap with more developed countries.

With the aim of contributing to the design of evidence-based public health policies in Latin America and the Caribbean and giving special consideration to patient or health service user perspectives, between 2012 and 2014 the Inter-American Development Bank carried out the Primary Care Access, Experience and Coordination Survey in Latin America and the Caribbean, in adult populations in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, Panama and Jamaica.

Uruguay is one of very few countries in Latin America that has a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of early childhood development. In 2015–2016, during the second wave of the survey, an observational module on the home environment was administered at scale for the first time. The module included items from two subscales (responsiveness and acceptance) of a widely used instrument that measures the quality of the physical and emotional environment: the HOME inventory.