This report—the product of a joint working group convened by the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Development Bank—focuses on firms and labor markets in Latin America and the Caribbean during the COVID-19 crisis and the highly uncertain recovery phase now underway. The ongoing Ru...

A well-known structural problem in Latin America is that firms are generally quite small and most workers in the region are concentrated in small firms. In recent years, about 32 percent of workers were self-employed, and of those working in firms, over 50 percent were in firms that employed 10 or f...

The article proposes a simple decision framework for policymakers who seek to institute gender-responsive ID systems. It highlights key questions that should be asked from the outset of system design, drawing upon examples of promising approaches that can be scaled in existing contexts or considered...

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting global recession, researchers have documented the economic impacts of the crisis, including in the form of individuals’ lost employment and income and increased poverty and food insecurity within households. To respond to these impacts, about 20...

IMF and World Bank 2022 growth projections for emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs), released in January this year, were not encouraging. They found that deteriorated macroeconomic fundamentals, partly resulting from policy responses to the pandemic, deep institutional deficiencies, and...

USAID recently released a draft Local Capacity Development (LCD) Policy. While USAID routinely invests in interventions designed to strengthen local capacity, this is the first time the agency has attempted to articulate principles that will govern its approach and propose, in broad terms, the steps...

This paper aims to determine the extent to which gender was considered in the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) operations aimed at responding to the COVID pandemic and associated economic crisis. Using keywords to identify COVID response projects, we found 264 projects approved between March ...