This report reviews the experience of Panama in designing and implementing innovation policy. It presents an overview of economic and innovation indicators in the country in a comparative perspective with other economies in Latin America, and beyond and it analyses the design and implementation.

Start-up Latin America 2016 presents an update of start-up promotion policies in the region. Start-ups are becoming a reality in Latin America and public policies are playing an important role in supporting their creation and expansion. This second edition reviews and compares the experiences ...

The Dominican Republic, though the fastest-growing economy in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2010, cannot afford complacency. The COVID-19 crisis may accelerate existing global trends that created the need for reforms addressing structural weaknesses that lurked beneath the surface well before the pandemic. The Production Transformation Policy Review (PTPR) of the Dominican Republic identifies priority reforms to update the national strategy, with perspectives on agro-food and nearshoring.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Panama has exhibited remarkable economic growth and has reduced the gap in terms of income per capita with high-income countries. Social progress has also been achieved, mainly through the reduction of poverty and advances in some well-being dimensions.

After a period of relatively robust growth that has allowed tens of millions of poorer households to join the global middle class, growth in Latin America has slowed recently, partly as a result of external factors.

Why is catch-up rare and why have some nations succeeded while others failed? This volumes examines how nations learn by reviewing key structural and contingent factors that contribute to dynamic learning and catch-up.

This volume explores the governance and management of science, technology, and innovation (STI) in relation to innovation policy and governance systems, highlighting its goal, challenges, and opportunities. Divided into two sections, it addresses the role of governments in promoting innovation in Latin-American contexts as well as barriers and opportunities for STI governance in the region. The chapters tackle the role of institutions, innovation funding, technological trajectories, regional innovation policies, innovation ecosystems, universities, knowledge appropriation, and markets. Researchers and scholars will find an opportunity to grasp a better understanding of innovation policies in emerging economies. This interdisciplinary work presents original research on science, technology and innovation policy and governance studies in an understudied region.

This book represents a systematic review of the documented impacts of programs aimed at fostering socio-emotional skills in developed and developing countries. It uses a life-cycle approach to organize the findings from rigorous evaluations of more than 80 programs. This includes programs for toddlers and young children before primary school, programs for students enrolled in formal education, and programs targeted at the out-of-school population. The book develops a conceptual framework that helps to identify the program characteristics and participants’ profiles associated with a range of program outcomes. These include health-related, behavioral, academic or cognitive, and economic-related outcomes. The review finds that few of the programs studied focus exclusively on the development of socio-emotional skills. In fact, most efforts to develop socio-emotional skills are embedded within innovative education and training curricula, as well as pedagogical and classroom practices. Evidence shows that programs are particularly effective when targeted to highly vulnerable populations and, in particular, to young children. Overall, findings indicate that high-quality programs for young children tend to foster cognitive abilities in the short run and to impact socio-emotional skills over the long run. Programs for students enrolled in formal education (primary and secondary levels) show positive and significant impacts on the outcomes reviewed. The most successful of these programs are implemented school-wide and follow the SAFE approach: that is, they are appropriately sequenced, active, focused, and explicit. Finally, the review finds that programs for out-of-school children and youth are usually designed as a means of achieving immediate labor market outcomes (e.g., job-placement, formal employment, and higher wages). While some of these programs show positive and statistically significant impacts on socio-emotional skills, the impacts tend to be small.

Latin America’s solid economic performance since 2003 has created the possibility of transforming the state for development. This year’s Latin American Economic Outlook examines the reform of the state in this context and recommends that Latin American states act now to deliver better services.