Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, countries are in the midst of debates about their health systems. Frequently, the characteristics of reforms in one country are used to promote or criticize particular proposals in another. Despite the great importance and potential from learning from...

This report analyzes the structure of family health spending in Brazil between 1987 and 1996, using a survey taken in 1996 survey of health spending by households. This report also tries to identify, although indirectly, the impact that universal access to health care had on family spending by...

This work will try to measure the differentiated effect that the changes in the economic conditions have on the families in terms of labor participation of the spouses and other members of the family, as well as its effect on the scholar attendance of children and young people.

Our aim in this document is, exactly, to present this transition between the paradigms in the case of Brazil, and to develop a central point in this transition: the construction process of the Unique Register (RU) [Cadastro Único]* for the families placed under the poverty line.

Over the last decades, social policy has been conceived from a sectorial perspective. This means that social policy responds more to government's organizational activities than to people's necessities; as if social problems could be approached from a unilateral perspective; in the same way that...

This presentation was commissioned by the Poverty Reduction and Social Protection Network of the Regional Policy Dialogue for the IV Hemispheric Meeting celebrated on November 11th and 12th, 2002. ODEF initiated operating in 1985 and the credit program in 1989. Became self-sufficient in 1996. It...

The purpose of this document is to inform Bank staff and other interested parties about recent developments in integration and trade among the countries of the Western Hemisphere and between these and other countries and world regions.

This Technical Note was commissioned by the Poverty Reduction and Social Protection Network of the Regional Policy Dialogue for the Caribbean Subregional Meeting celebrated on February 23rd and 24th, 2006 in Kingston, Jamaica. Effective Policies to Meet the MDG Agenda in the Caribbean

In this paper we will not intend to derive improved poverty measures for the Americas. Our pretensions are much more modest. The purposes of the paper are to provide an inventory of available poverty estimates for the countries of the region derived from a variety of studies and data sources...

This presentation was commissioned by the Poverty Reduction and Social Protection Network of the Regional Policy Dialogue for the VII Hemispheric Meeting celebrated on November 11th and 12th, 2004. In the ¿90, there have been created more than 70 programs to fight the poverty, depending on 7...