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...

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...

How should governments and donors engage with the growing private sector in education in developing countries? Enrolment in private schools now exceeds 50 percent at the primary level in many major urban centres across Africa and Asia. Whilst the majority of these schools are small and independently...

Foreign aid donors and international organizations supporting education in developing countries have increasingly coalesced around a policy agenda prioritizing foundational learning, measured by test scores in primary school, based on a diagnosis of deficient school quality, and a growing body of em...

After more than a year of grappling with the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, many middle-income countries (MICs) will continue to experience health and economic dislocation for some time to come. While much of the global financial community’s attention has focused on supporting low-income...

How did children learn while schools were closed during 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of live tutoring calls from teachers, using a randomized controlled trial with 4,399 primary school students in Sierra Leone.