his paper presents estimates of the impact of programs for unemployed workers on the performance of program beneficiaries in Mexico. We emphasize the significance of applying methodologies capable of avoiding statistical bias attributable to unobserved variables when measuring the impact on earnings and allowing to us properly estimate unemployment duration and work status after exiting from...

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This paper raises the point that only few health reforms implemented in Latin American countries modified the existing health systems in order to fix the problems brought by the institutional fragmentation typical of this sector. A great part of these reforms did not implemented the necessary measures to improve coordination among health systems in the prevailing pluralistic model and besides,...

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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...

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This paper aims to analyse the space and time distribution of the infant mortality rate (IMR) at municipality level in Colombia before and after conferring greater responsibilities to the municipalities for the administration of the local health care systems. Using special econometrics, we find that there is a geographical concentration of IMR persisting over time and defining two groups of...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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In recent decades, interest has increased in identifying, estimating and linking social capital to a variety of well-being variables in which the production of certain benefits or performance is key. Research has involved the confluence of several disciplines: economics, sociology, anthropology and psychology, to name a few. Although consensus on the definition of a single indicator for measuring...

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Micro and small-sized enterprises (MSE) have a central role in economic development in Latin America given their large contribution to employment generation, their share in the total number of firms and, to a lesser extent, their contribution to gross domestic product. Yet, their production is mainly oriented to the domestic market and they are characterized by an increasing productivity gap with...

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Crime has become the leading concern for citizens of the region and has been pushed to the forefront of the international policy agenda; what is more, the combination of very few success stories and abundant failures in curbing crime and violence has underscored how thin our understanding is and the difficulty of designing and implementing an effective strategy at the local level. This issue...

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In this issue of Well-being and Social Policy we have tried to include articles that support the debate around social insurance in health. This is an issue in which simple answers are hardly ever found, and a long term effort is required to understand the idiosyncrasy of each country and the best mix of regulation and financing options. Additionally, the studied cases point out to the need of a...

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This article presents the Mexican experience with the introduction of basic transaction accounts. Basic accounts are relatively cheap simple banking products with restricted functionality targeted at social groups that have limited access to transaction accounts. In Mexico, basic payroll accounts and accounts for the general public were introduced. By law, these products must be offered by all...

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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...

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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...

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This paper presents and applies the social risk management (SRM) conceptual framework to examine links between disaster risk, hazards, vulnerability, risk management, and social protection (SP). The paper makes the case that it is important to mainstream social protection policies into the disaster risk management (DRM) agenda and, vice versa as a means to improve household and community...

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El presente documento, está centrado en las Mipyme y en las políticas públicas para su fomento en la economía costarricense. El análisis, se hace a partir de un enfoque alternativo de clasificación de las actividades económicas, el cual permite precisar con mayor detalle las desigualdades entre las actividades tradicionales de amplia trayectoria en la economía, de aquellas actividades que han...

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The Inter-American Conference on Social Security (CISS) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Office in Mexico jointly organized the conference “Natural Disasters in Latin America: Welfare Impacts and Social Protection Solutions” held in Mexico City in January 2010. The main objectives of the conference were to improve the understanding of (i) how natural disasters affect...

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An organization is a group of persons who satisfy established membership requirement and whose form and function are generally acknowledged. An organization's membership requirements may be based on inherited or earned traits. Organizations exist because they provide a setting in which members with similar traits can meet their physical and their socioemotional needs. As the relative importance...

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This research paper intends to quantifit targeting performance in terms of the efficiency of the 1 National Plan for Social Emergency Assistance (PANES) implemented in Uruguay between 2005 and 2007 and determine its impact on relevant issues such as school attendance, child labor and the labor market. For this analysis , we used 2006 and 2007 Continual Household Survey (ECH) data. Our outcomes...

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