The last Public Expenditure Review for Ecuador (PER) was produced in 1993. More than a decade later, the purpose of this report is to provide the Ecuadorian authorities with the World Bank's and Inter-American Development Bank's joint comprehensive account of their diagnoses and recommendations...

This paper evaluates Progressive Housing Program; a public housing program that facilitates the purchase of a new home. The evaluation finds that the program’s package (savings requirement, voucher and mortgage) design is inappropriate if the program is targeted to the poor. In fact the...

The Mexican Government initiated two innovative programs cash transfer schemes in the last decade: PROGRESA, which is a national anti-poverty scheme directed at chronic rural poverty, and PROCAMPO, a scheme designed to compensate farmers for the negative price effects of NAFTA. The analysis of...

Durante la década de los noventa, los Fondos de Inversión Social fueron el mecanismo por excelencia para la entrega de obras sociales a poblaciones vulnerables en épocas de ajustes y crisis económicas. Desde entonces, los FIS se han convertido en instituciones con objetivos de más largo...

Cash transfer programs have become extremely popular in the developing world. There is a large literature on the effects of these programs on schooling, health and nutrition, but relatively little is known about possible impacts on child development. This paper analyzes the impact of a cash...

This paper reviews the contribution of agriculture and rural development to poverty reduction by examining the transformation of five territories in four countries of Asia (Malaysia and People's Republic of China) and Latin America (Brazil and Peru) that have experienced substantial reductions...

School is one of the most important socializing environments for children, since it is where they spend a great deal of time interacting with teachers and peers. However, the persistent spillover of community socioeconomic conditions and violence means that schools and their surroundings are no...

This study uses data from Malaysia's Household Income and Expenditure Surveys to quantify the importance of different factors in accounting for the changes in Malaysia's income distribution between 1984 and 1989 ("Period 1") and between 1989 and 1997 ("Period 2"). The analysis is therefore...

More than a third of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean currently live in poverty. Will the region be able to simultaneously increase economic growth and reduce poverty given its scarce fiscal resources? The message of this paper is that the public policies needed to achieve these...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the performance of the Venezuelan labor market in the period between 1982 and 1995, and to analyze its impact on the evolution of poverty. This period analyzed is a convulsed one, one within Venezuela that suffered from the consequences of both changes in...