Latin America. Reform or Revolution? A Reader

Evaluating multigrade school reform in Latin America

This paper describes three multigrade school reforms in Latin America: (1) Colombia’s Escuela Nueva, (2) Guatemala’s Nueva Escuela Unitaria, and (3) Chile’s MECE-Rural. Each reform endowed primary teachers and students with special training and instructional materials, and encouraged new kinds of instruction in rural classrooms, with the goal of improving student learning. The paper discusses t...

Fraternity and Educational Reform in Latin America

The author proposes that in a democratic society, education serves to establish fundamental relationships of fraternity, generating the “social capital” that bonds citizens together. Against this perspective, he examines the cultural values transmitted in the educational systems of six Latin American countries. He finds that following world-wide trends, the curricula have shifted from privilegi...

Institutions and Economic Development: Judicial Reform in Latin America

Health-system reform and universal health coverage in Latin America.

Starting in the late 1980s, many Latin American countries began social sector reforms to alleviate poverty, reduce socioeconomic inequalities, improve health outcomes, and provide financial risk protection. In particular, starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at strengthening health systems to reduce inequalities in health access and outcomes focused on expansion of universal health coverage, es...

Economic Reform and Wage Differentials in Latin America

This paper presents a new approach for exploring the relation between the implementation of economic reforms and wage differentials. It is applied to a new high quality database that includes 18 Latin American countries. The results indicate that reforms overall have had a short-run disequalizing effect of expanding wage differentials, although this effect tends to fade away over time. This dis...