In 2011 the Government of El Salvador implemented a reform to the gas subsidy that increased the welfare of households in all but the top two deciles of the income distribution. However, the reform turned out to be rather unpopular, especially among winners. This paper relies on ad hoc household...

This paper shows evidence that suggests the economic slowdown in Latin America and the Caribbean has already translated into slowing social gains, including decelerating poverty reduction, stagnating growth of the middle class, and lower income growth. The countries of South America outperformed...

Behavioral Insights for Development: Cases from Central America brings together a set of experiences that applied behavioral insights to different areas of public policy-Win some cases through randomized control trials, and in others using surveys or behavioral games. These experiences...

Although there is wide recognition of the negative consequences of policy volatility for countries' long-term economic growth, there is limited empirical work on this subject. One of the reasons is the difficulty of measuring policy volatility over long periods of time, especially in developing...

This study uses text mining techniques on almost 900 presidential "state-of-the-union"-type speeches from 10 Latin American countries from 1819 to 2016. The paper documents a sharp increase in recent decades in references to poverty and inequality. The study's long-term view shows that the way...