Inflation has become a central feature of the global economy. In Latin America (aside from idiosyncratic cases such as Argentina and Venezuela, where high inflation rates have long been the norm), inflation began to rise the first half of 2021, at the same time it did in the US. The fact that risin...

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...

Countries throughout Asia are experiencing rapidly aging populations and increasing life expectancy, leading to a large and growing demand for long-term care (LTC) services. Despite the shift to providing care within communities and at home, governments are struggling to provide enough LTC to meet d...

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...

In the face of sudden economic shocks and natural disasters that limit the ability of economies to rapidly raise revenue, MDBs have the potential to play a leading role in crisis response to minimize the damage. One key factor in their success in this role is the speed of their financing instruments...