Countries have pledged to stabilize global warming at a 1.5 to 2êC increase. Either target requires reaching net zero emissions before the end of the century, which implies a major transformation of the economic system. This paper reviews the literature on how policymakers can design climate...

Drawing on a comprehensive compilation of quantile shares and inequality measures for 34 countries, including over 5,600 estimated Gini coefficient, we review the measurement of income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last seven decades. Although the evidence from the first...

A key challenge for policymakers is how to design methods to select beneficiaries of social programs when income is volatile and the target population is dynamic. We evaluate a traditional static proxy-means test (PMT) and three policy-relevant alternatives. We use a unique panel dataset of a...

This study investigates the disconnect between falling agricultural commodity prices and persistent food inflation by applying a Heterogeneous Vector Autoregression (VAR) model to a panel of 203 countries using data from 1961 to 2022. It analyzes the impact of global crops, fertilizer, and oil...

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of extremely hot days. We use a panel regression framework at the sub-national (i.e., region) level to identify the effect of extreme heat on economic growth in Latin America accounting for acclimation to the season and to the...

El cambio climático (CC) representa uno de los desafíos globales más grandes en la actualidad. A nivel global, las emisiones de dióxido de carbono (CO2) provenientes del sector transporte representan el 25% del total. En el caso de América Latina y el Caribe (ALC), el sector genera el 40%...

An issue that affects the effectiveness of water pricing policies is consumers misperception, which implies that households decide their water consumption based on poor/inaccurate information about the marginal price. We use household survey data on bill and quality perception in Brazil to...

This paper provides the first empirical estimates of the relationship between temperatures and household electricity consumption in Colombia, using electricity billing and weather data from 2010 to 2019. I find that higher temperatures (or higher values of the heat index) increase electricity...

Latin America and the Caribbean must respond to the challenge of climate change while making progress with other sustainable development goals. How much will it cost to meet climate change goals in this context? This work reviews the evidence on the costs of meeting the goals the goals of the...

By 2017, one-quarter of people born in El Salvador were estimated to be living in the U.S. We show that extreme temperatures have negatively affected agricultural production and increased international migration from El Salvador. We find that labor markets act as a transmission mechanism of the...