This paper provides a synthesis of the four papers on the Latin American and Caribbean economies: Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. It focuses on the following themes: macroeconomic stabilization and fiscal challenges, poverty and inequality, and the use of natural resources...

Many commentators have noted the existence of a historical correlation between cities and democratization. This image of the city as an inherently civic space is linked to the notion that the spatial concentration intrinsic to urban contexts promotes a democracy of proximity. Seen from this...

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a simple method that takes advantage of both types...

Current urban interventions, particularly in cities in developing countries like Santiago de Chile, evidence major neglect in understanding the way contemporary living takes place and how it is changing under processes of globalization, global warming, technological advances, as well as specific...

The paper analyses the changes in tax policy, tax/GDP ratios, tax incidence and income inequality which have taken place in Latin America during the last decade against the background of the changes observed in these variables during the liberal years of the 1980s and 1990s. The paper argues...

The paper tracks recent changes in the components of social protection in Latin America, the reforms to social insurance in the 1990s and the growth of social assistance in the 2000s, and assesses their effects on poverty and inequality and implications for welfare institutions in the region....

This chapter analyses the main features of industrial policies carried out in Latin America since 1990. It studies these policies during import substitution industrialization and how they changed after the market-oriented economic reforms. It presents the main national strategies, policy lines...

The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which - if continued for another 2-3 years - would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre-liberalization levels. The paper then focuses on the...

Declining social and economic inequalities since the late 1990s coincided with several basic shifts in Latin America's political landscape, including an electoral turn to the left and a revival of social mobilization from below. These shifts helped to 'repoliticize' inequality and return...

Labour market incomes have been a major contributor to the important fall in inequality in Latin America during the 2000s. Indeed, it was the main contributor in countries where inequality fell more dramatically. A proper understanding of the workings of the labour market is necessary to...