Studies of the effects of pre-school programs on child development in developing countries have found scant impact. This study was conducted to reconcile the importance of daycare for child development with the empirical estimates of small effects. Using a random sample of 500 children from 100...

School attendance in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has increased exponentially in the last two decades, almost every child goes to primary school and access to preschool and high school is fast catching up. This increase in access has been mostly led by more attendance to school of...

The private provision of educational services has been representing an increasing fraction of the Peruvian schooling system, especially in recent decades. While there have been many claims about the differences in quality between private and public schools, there is no complete assessment of the...

This paper surveys housing finance in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama. The development of a secondary mortgage-backed securities market in Costa Rica is very limited despite a broad legal framework, while in El Salvador it is nonexistent and in Panama has not grown due to high liquidity. In...

Housing for most Peruvians is improving but is still grossly inadequate. Nonetheless, public housing finance policies mainly involve programs that subsidize middle-income families and banks that lend to them. Research summarized in this paper indicates that financing will not be the main...

In 2001, Mexico introduced a comprehensive federal housing policy package. The results have been quantitatively impressive; however, there are qualitative concerns. It is also uncertain whether current subsidy programs have negative financial implications for participating mortgage issuers, as...

In Guatemala there are substantial and growing imbalances in the housing market; at the same time, financial markets remain shallow and underdeveloped. The analytical framework applied in this paper starts by identifying the types of market failures responsible for the underdevelopment of the...

La estabilización de las economías y una transformación profunda pero silenciosa de las instituciones ocurrieron en forma paralela en América Latina en las últimas décadas. Este artículo analiza los canales de influencia de los cambios de las instituciones fiscales y de los sistemas...

The microinsurance market in Latin America is still in its embryonic phase. The purpose of this technical note is to better inform donors, national governments, and insurance companies interested in promoting financial inclusion about how they can accelerate the development of microinsurance...

El presente estudio evalúa los sitios web de transparencia de los gobiernos de 18 países Latinoamericanos por medio de la búsqueda en Internet, con el propósito de identificar tres tipos de requisitos relacionados con: (i) la revelación del contenido de la gestión de las finanzas...