This report explores the agrologistics challenges and opportunities faced by agri-food systems in three countries in Northern Central America (NCA), namely El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, with a specific focus on the impacts on family farming systems. As an overarching principle guiding the...

The paper assembles and harmonizes sectoral data from several sources to study the industrial trends in six Central American economies. The industrial employment share contracted by 2.5 percentage points on average over the past two decades. This deindustrialization was not trade-driven in which...

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has had widespread negative effects in developing countries around the world, generating an unprecedented shock. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) was a particularly affected region, recording a significant contraction in regional GDP and international...

Despite the well-documented human costs of the war on drugs, and the growing evidence of the environmental impacts of illicit economies, the militarized repression of the illicit drug trade remains a central hemispheric security and cooperation strategy in Northern and Central American...

Honduras has been Central America’s focal point for drug trafficking towards the United States for years as the region’s main transit country. Recent court cases held in the United States have revealed the symbiotic relationship between state actors, business elites and drug trafficking...

Cocaine trafficking has a significant but understudied influence on Central American economies. The economic implications of this trade have repercussions for both regional development and drug control policy debates, and therefore deserve greater attention. Towards that end, in this paper we...

Very few labor-based pathways for regular migration are available for people in Northern Central America, often called the 'Northern Triangle' of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. This note briefly summarizes the state of labor-based migration channels in the region. It then argues that...

This research explores the competitive environment for urban formal sector firms competing against peer formal sector firms behaving informally in Central America. Explored is the upper bound of the formal-informal continuum in a regional economic environment of persistent and widespread...

The pandemic has urged countries around the globe to mobilize financing to support the recovery. This is even more relevant in Central America, where the policy response to cushion the pandemic’s economic and social impact has accentuated pre-existing debt vulnerabilities. This paper documents...