After the economic losses, unemployment and mass death of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of how to effectively manage lockdowns has to be answered. Many experts believe another pandemic is inevitable. If that is true, we have to be ready with empirically tested policies that can maximize economic welfare while preserving life to the maximum extent … [Read more...] about Better Public Policies to Combat Pandemics
Social Issues
The Financial Impacts of Disability: Data for Better Policy Design
About one in seven, or more than 88 million people, in Latin America and the Caribbean live with a disability that can affect access to fundamental rights, such as education, employment, and health care. This percentage is expected to increase to one in five people by mid-century as the population ages. Yet while the region increasingly recognizes the needs of people with … [Read more...] about The Financial Impacts of Disability: Data for Better Policy Design
Good Government and the Fight Against Air Pollution’s Mortal Threat
When we think of our personal health, we tend to focus on things like giving up tobacco and alcohol and ensuring good sanitation and cleanliness. Air pollution is not at the top of the list, but it belongs there. It is the greatest single external risk to health, reducing life expectancy by a global average of 2.3 years, according to the University of Chicago's 2023 Air Quality … [Read more...] about Good Government and the Fight Against Air Pollution’s Mortal Threat
A Nobel Prize on Women in the Labor Market that Speaks to Latin America and the Caribbean
Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard, became the first woman ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences individually, without co-winners, on October 9, when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences held up her work as generating "the first comprehensive account of women's earnings and labour market participation through the centuries." Goldin's pioneering studies, … [Read more...] about A Nobel Prize on Women in the Labor Market that Speaks to Latin America and the Caribbean
How the COVID Pandemic Affected Automation and Labor Markets in Peru
As COVID-19 struck the developing world, governments imposed mobility restrictions to reduce contagion, causing severe disruptions in labor markets. In Latin America and the Caribbean, where 57% of all workers hold informal jobs that often require them to be physically present, nearly half of the labor force was compelled to stop work in the first phases of the … [Read more...] about How the COVID Pandemic Affected Automation and Labor Markets in Peru