This paper studies the relationship between inequality of opportunity and development outcomes in a cross-country setting. Scholars have long debated the impact of inequality on growth, development, and the quality of institutions in a society. The empirical relationships are however confounded...

This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it provides new evidence of the impact of community monitoring interventions using a unique dataset from the Citizen Visible Audit (CVA) program in Colombia. In particular, this article studies the effect of social audits on...

This article studies the extent to which participation in productive associations in Nicaragua contributes to increase individuals'access to social programs and credit services. By participating in productive associations, individuals give a good signal to firms and are rewarded with better...

This paper presents a set of statistics that characterize the degree of income polarization in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The study is based on a dataset of household surveys from 21 LAC countries in the period 1989-2004. Latin America is characterized by a high level of income...

Transparency and integrity are key factors in consolidating democratic governance and deepening the modernization of the state. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has been supporting country efforts to achieve open government, providing technical support and knowledge on transparency in...

There is a belief that allowing communities monitoring power over providers could be beneficial for improving service delivery and reducing corruption in service delivery. In community monitoring interventions (CMIs), the community is given the opportunity to observe and assess providers'...

School enrollment has universally increased over the last 25 years in low-income countries. Enrolling in school, however, does not assure that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic...

This article studies the extent to which participation in productive associations in Nicaragua contributes to increase individual's access to social programs and credit services. By participating in productive associations, individuals give a good signal to firms and are rewarded with better...

This paper assesses inequality of opportunity in educational achievement using the Human Opportunity Index methodology on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment. The findings suggest that there are large inequalities in learning outcomes as measured by demonstrated...