Over the past three decades, many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have recognized health as a human right. Since the early 2000s, 46 million more people in the countries studied are covered by health programs with explicit entitlements to care. Reforms have been accompanied by a rise in public spending for health, financed largely by general revenues that prioritize or explicitly target the population without capacity to pay. Political commitment has generally translated into larger budgets as well as passage of legislation that ring-fenced funding for health. Most countries have...

While other emerging regions have been thriving, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's aggregate export performance over the past two decades has been consistently weak. Using detailed firm-level export data from Customs administrations, Champions Wanted explains why. One central finding of the book is that the size distribution of MENA's exporting firms is suggestive of a critical weakness at the top. With the exception of the top firm, MENA's elite exporters are smaller and weaker compared to their peers in other regions. The largest exporter is alone at the top--Zidane without a...

L'Afrique a besoin d'energie-- l'electricite est indispensable pour ameliorer le bien-etre de ses habitants et developper ses economies. Mais la capacite de production du secteur de l'electricite de l'Afrique subsaharienne est la plus faible du monde. Les deux tiers de la population de la region n'ont pas acces a l'electricite. Et ceux qui y ont acces, sont les plus faibles consommateurs du monde. Les entreprises considerent l'instabilite de l'approvisionnement en electricite comme un obstacle majeur. Dans le meme temps, de vastes ressources energetiques restent inexploitees. Il faudrait...

Between 2003 and 2008, Croatia's rapid growth was fueled by rising domestic consumption, growing deficits, an increased dependence on international finance. Such growth is unlikely to resume in the near future, imposing social and economic costs. In this context, exports are critically important for Croatia's development and employment generation. However, the country's trade performance has been lackluster since the financial crisis. Export openness is lower than in countries with similar income levels, and the country's per capita GDP has stagnated. Low export diversification, weak...

The economic and social prospects are daunting for the 89 million out-of-school youth who comprise nearly half of all youth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Within the next decade, when this cohort becomes the core of the labor market, an estimated 40 million more youth will drop out, and will face an uncertain future with limited work and life skills. Furthermore, out-of-school youth often are "policy orphans," positioned between sectors with little data, low implementation capacity, lack of interest in long-term sustainability of programs, insufficient funds, and little coordination across the...

Argentina is passing through a demographic transition that constitutes a window of economic and social opportunities and challenges. Argentina's working-age population represents the largest proportion of its total population. The country just began a 30-year period with the most advantageous age structure of its population, which could favor greater economic growth. This situation, known as the demographic window of opportunity, will last until the 2040s. The dynamics of the fertility and mortality rates signify a gradual aging of the population, with implications for various dimensions of...

Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion presents 'profiles' or 'portraits' of individuals who have limited labor-market attachment. It is widely accepted that those with limited attachment to the labor market are a highly heterogeneous group (including, for instance, recent job losers, long-term unemployed, school leavers with no labor-market experience, those close to retirement age, or people with caring responsibilities), and that understanding their circumstances and potential barriers is an essential prerequisite for designing and implementing a tailored and effective mix of policy support...

Even as countries in Sub-Saharan Africa work towards achieving better learning outcomes for children through systemic reform, the affordability and availability of textbooks remains a persistent challenge. Yet despite extensive technical support and funding from external development partners, including the World Bank, making textbooks affordable and available to teachers and students remains an elusive objective for most countries in the region. Most African countries experience low learning outcomes and high drop-out rates. Only two-thirds of those who enter school reach the final grade, and...

For Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic-Central America free trade agreement (CAFTA-DR) has been more than a trade agreement. Costa Rica has used trade liberalization and promotion of international trade as a core development strategy for decades. CAFTA-DR consolidated benefits that had previously been unilaterally extended under the Caribbean Basin Initiative into a multilateral free trade agreement, providing a more stable environment for trade relationships. Beyond just being a trade agreement, CAFTA-DR opened up state monopolies in telecommunications and insurance, which polarized the...