Following a strong rebound in economic activity in 2021, real GDP is estimated to have expanded by 2.8 percent last year. Meanwhile, inflation jumped to 7¼ percent, and the current account deficit rose sharply partly reflecting higher commodity prices and despite a narrowing of the fiscal...

El Salvador has recovered well from the pandemic, supported by robust remittances and buoyant tourism flows, amid a sharp improvement in the country's security situation. Inflation has fallen and the external imbalances have narrowed more recently, consistent with a gradual improvement in public...

This study explores how geographical factors shape El Salvador's banking sector, particularly focusing on regional disparities, urbanization, and vulnerability to natural disasters affecting access to financial services. By employing a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative data and...

By 2020, one in four Salvadorans lived abroad, with 88 percent residing in the United States. The remittances to GDP ratio was about 25 percent, highlighting the country's dependence on migration. This paper examines the effects of a major U.S. immigration enforcement program—Secure...

By 2020, one in four Salvadorans lived abroad, with 88 percent residing in the United States. The remittances to GDP ratio was about 25 percent, highlighting the country's dependence on migration. This paper examines the effects of a major U.S. immigration enforcement program - Secure...

Since the mid-2000s, extortion has impacted social and economic development in El Salvador significantly. Against the grain of the extant literature, which predominantly takes for granted that extorted businesses are passive victims, we leverage business surveys and 103 interviews, primarily...

El presente documento identifica recomendaciones para replicar y ampliar el análisis del potencial de metano en PTAR de mediana y pequeña capacidad; Además, propone estrategias para impulsar opciones de financiamiento climático. Para ello, es fundamental considerar como criterio central la...

This paper examines inconsistencies in the decision-making of a sample of 2,248 adolescents from El Salvador when completing two classic experiments: temporal discounting and risk preferences. Inconsistency in responses is a significant issue when collecting experimental data because it implies...

In this essay, I argue that the explosion of inflation during the Salvador Allende administration in Chile (above 1,500% on a six-month annualized measure) was predictable. The government's use of massive and strict price controls generated acute macroeconomic imbalances. I postulate that the...

En el presente informe se propone un programa para sobre la base de los logros alcanzados para volver a acelerar la reducción de la pobreza Salvadoreños. La última Evaluación de la Pobreza del Banco Mundial para El Salvador, a partir de 2015, propuso dos políticas clave Recomendaciones: a)...

Globally, 150 million adolescents report being victims of or engaging in peer-to-peer violence in and around school. One strategy to reduce this risk is to occupy youth in after-school programs (ASP). Yet, the question remains: how does peer group composition affect the effectiveness of an ASP?...

The objective of this feasibility study is to identify disaster risk finance and insurance (DRFI) solutions for up to 1.9 million family farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This study is motivated by an emerging consensus on the need to design and implement large-scale DRFI...

This paper explores a monetary experiment, the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador in 2021, to analyze the impact of digital currencies on international capital flows. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that, instead of making transfers easier, El Salvador's...

The objective of this paper is to verify the effect of the location of health facilities on amenable and child mortality in the city of Salvador in Brazil. Based on the theory of local public goods, we consider that the provision of public health facilities affects the local health condition,...

Globally, 150 million adolescents report being victims of or engaging in peer-to-peer violence in and around school. One strategy to reduce this risk is to occupy youth in after-school programs (ASP). Yet, the question remains: how does peer group composition affect the effectiveness of an ASP?...

Since the mid-2000s, extortion has impacted social and economic development in El Salvador significantly. Against the grain of the extant literature, which predominantly takes for granted that extorted businesses are passive victims, we leverage business surveys and 103 interviews, primarily...

Understanding health-seeking behaviors and their drivers is key for governments to manage health policies. There is a growing literature on the role of cognitive biases and heuristics in health and care-seeking behaviors, but little is known of how they might be influenced during a context of...

Montero (2022) explores a discontinuity in a land reform in El Salvador and reports two main findings. First, relative to outside-owned haciendas operated by contract workers, the productivity of worker-owned cooperatives is higher for staple crops and lower for cash-crop. Second, cooperative...

This paper provides a contextual analysis of the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador. First, we outline the historical context and the political situation of the period 2019- 24 that serve as context for the passage and implementation of the Bitcoin law (Decree No. 57). We...

This paper estimates the long-term effects on human capital accumulation and subsequent labor market outcomes of in utero and early childhood exposure to the civil war in El Salvador (1980-92), the second longest and deadliest civil conflict in Central America. Identification is obtained from...

The impact of violence from young gangs on the economic growth is obviously substantial, but measuring such impact to get a sense of the intensity of its effects on the economic performance is subject to a great deal of uncertainty. As such, this paper primarily attempts to close this gap by...

This article identifies the elements that a developing country, such as El Salvador, needs to produce better quality research and use the key results to inform public policy. In the Salvadoran case, the social sciences develop in an ecosystem with a variety of stakeholders, resources and basic...

We apply the Gross City Development Index (GCD-Index) by Ruiz Estrada and Park (2019) in the case of San Salvador, El Salvador. The GCD-Index calculation is based on the concept of City integral sustainable development platform. The platform consists of ten main structures, which are (i) Main...

Montero (2022) explores a discontinuity in a land reform in El Salvador and reports two main findings. First, relative to outside-owned haciendas operated by contract workers, the productivity of worker-owned cooperatives is higher for staple crops and lower for cash-crop. Second, cooperative...

Governments in hegemonic states use economic sanctions to induce changes in other countries. What happens to international business networks when these sanctions are in place? We use new historical firm-level data to document the destruction of financial relations between U.S. banks and Chilean...