The Inter-American Conference on Social Security (CISS) and Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) co-hosted an international conference on "The Quality of Education in Latin America and the Caribbean" in February 2007. The conference examined the quality of education in the region, the determinants of learning, policy and program evaluation, and the impact of quality of education on the labor market....

• Más detalles

This book gathers analyses performed by several authors on policies considered appropriate by the World Bank to enhance the quality of basic education provided in Mexico, in particular, education received by majority sectors in our society (World Bank: 2005).

• Más detalles

This study uses data from Colombia’s 2003 Encuesta de Calidad de Vida to examine how well do electricity strata (proxy for socioeconomic status) explain the choice decision for type of institution and session attended. In the model of choice by type – private vs. public universities – I find that as the electricity strata increases, the marginal probability of enrolling in a public university...

• Más detalles

Over the last decade, Argentina embarked on a broad education reform, the Federal Education Law (LFE), being its main objective to expand access to basic education, mainly, by a new organization of the schooling level structure with the extension of mandatory schooling from 7 to 10 years. The provinces reactions were heterogeneous. We try to evaluate the relationship among the LFE and access and...

• Más detalles

We use the PISA 2003 student-level achievement database for Mexico to estimate state education production functions. Student characteristics, family background, home inputs, resources and institutions are controlled for. We take advantage of the state-level variation and representative sample to analyze the impact of institutional factors such as state accountability systems and the role of...

• Más detalles

Different economic studies have shown the importance of education in improving the quality of life of individuals. Thus, in the 90’s, the public education system was reformed to enhance the quality of public education in Brazil and motivate student interest. This paper participated in this discussion by suggesting an assessment of the impact that school infrastructure and family characteristics...

• Más detalles

The private provision of educational services has been representing an increasing fraction of the Peruvian schooling system, especially in recent last decades. While there have been many claims about the differences in quality between private and public schools, there is no complete assessment of the different impacts of these two type of providers on the labor markets. This paper is an attempt...

• Más detalles

This paper draws on a political economy model to hypothesize that the quality of education is likely to be lowered by both economic and political inequalities. In particular, we utilize a panel data set across countries and over time to test the applicability of the hypothesis to quality of education indicators at the primary level. Among the four specific indicators of primary education assigned...

• Más detalles

The Inter-American Conference on Social Security (CISS) and Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) co-hosted an international conference on "The Quality of Education in Latin America and the Caribbean" in February 2007. The main obj ective of the conference was to examine quality of education in the region, the determinants of learning, policy and program evaluation, and the impact of quality of...

• Más detalles

As the volume title suggests, three of the studies deal with the effects of remittances on incomes and measures of well-being, four address various aspects of highly skilled migration, while the remaining paper examines the determinants of migration from rural Mexico to the US. Each of these is certainly topical: the rise in reported global remittance flows has been a major spur to the recent...

• Más detalles

International migrants are persons who cross national borders and remain outside their countries of birth or citizenship for 12 months or more, regardless of the reason for being abroad or legal status while abroad. According to UN estimates, the number of international migrants was 191 million in 2005, and half were in the labor force of the destination country. International labor migration...

• Más detalles

We seek to further understand the factors that determine per emigrant remittances using data from 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries over the 1980-2003 period. We find that emigrants avoid remitting when the exchange rate is under pressure. This finding is consistent with the notion that remitters strive to reduce their exposure to exchange rate losses by taking into account the expected...

• Más detalles

We explore the time pattern of remittances using data on return migrants from the Mexican Migration Project. Some of these return migrants have settled in the U.S. and are returning to Mexico to visit family and friends, whereas others are temporary migrants returning home after a working spell in the U.S. We find that the dollar amount remitted first increases with time spent in the U.S. to...

• Más detalles

The focus on short-term macroeconomic factors, including unemployment and wages, is insufficient to explain international migration. Institutional factors, bound to change only in the long run, can potentially have a large impact on migration flows. To illustrate this, we analyze Mexico-U.S. migration focusing on social security coverage, an important indicator of job formality. Using...

• Más detalles

In this paper, I use longitudinal data from the 1998 and 2001 Living Standard Measurement Surveys in Nicaragua to examine the impact of the emigration of household members on the household labor market integration and poverty. The main findings of the paper are that households from which an emigrant left had a reduction in members, a reduction in working members, a reduction in labor income than...

• Más detalles

The Inter-American Conference on Social Security (CISS) and Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) co-hosted an international conference on “The Effects of Migration on Sending Countries” in February of 2006. The major objective of the conference was to examine a variety of channels through which migration affects the sending countries. Migrants change the dynamic of sending households; alter labor...

• Más detalles

The purpose of this essay is to appraise alternative hypothesis about the origins of recent social revolt in Mexico. It shows that it is not clear that a severe rise in poverty preceded the origins of violent conflict but social polarisation. Therefore, government attempts to deactivate the economic factors that led to social unrest did not necessarily upgrade povertyreduction policies. The...

• Más detalles

It has been widely accepted that reforms on pension schemes have led to improvements in the financial viability of the systems. Nevertheless, at the same time it has been shown that fees charged by pension fund managers (PFM) are very high, implying high mark-ups for them and lower expected pensions for the participants. The presence of economies of scale has been suggested as one main reason for...

• Más detalles

This paper describes the Chilean experience concerning the implementation of a new unemployment insurance (UI) program. The use of individual savings accounts and private management are essential elements. In addition, a redistributive fund (Common Fund) helps workers pool risks, distributing resources from employed to unemployed workers and from stable firms to workers with low incomes and...

• Más detalles

Various circumstances make difficult the rigorous study of processes, strategies and impact of V the efforts of financial inclusion and penetration, either at the academie level, in the public policy area or in companies and organizations of financial services industry. The central problem in Mexico has been the lack of a unified agreement on the definition and the low comprehension level of the...

• Más detalles