This report identifies LAC countries’ main climate change policy priorities, which were discussed through a series of Regional Policy Dialogues and Expert Workshops and complements these with findings of recent analyses by the OECD and other international partners. It explores issues related to their implementation on climate adaptation, mitigation, and cross-cutting policy areas.

The 2024 edition of Government at a Glance Latin America and the Caribbean provides the latest available evidence on public administrations and their performance in the LAC region and compares it to OECD countries.

This report discusses ways of enhancing government capacities to prevent, react and rebuild, thereby minimising the impact of natural disasters on infrastructure assets and operations. It identifies data, collaboration and technologies as drivers of resilience, and highlights financial resources, technical skills and regulatory frameworks as key enablers. The report presents seven actionable principles to ensure infrastructure resilience, drawing from global good practices and in-depth analyses of infrastructure projects in Colombia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mozambique and the United States.

After a robust recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, Colombia's economic growth is returning to a low potential. Medium-term growth prospects depend on maintaining Colombia's strong macroeconomic framework and enacting reforms to create a business-friendly environment which can attract high levels of investment. Implementing fiscal consolidation and adhering to fiscal rules would prevent rising financing costs and safeguard debt sustainability. Reforms to raise tax revenues and improve spending efficiency are needed to create fiscal space for social and productive investment needs. Enhancing the investment climate requires reducing regulatory uncertainties and tackling corruption. Creating connected transport infrastructure, strengthening subnational government capacities and improving equalisation mechanisms in the fiscal transfer system would foster balanced development across the country. Addressing informality, gender gaps, and improving education quality would boost productivity and reduce social disparities. Investing in climate adaptation, renewable energy, and establishing stable regulatory frameworks are key for a climate-resilient economy and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. SPECIAL FEATURES: RAISING PRODUCTIVITY; REDUCING LABOUR INFORMALITY; REGIONAL CONVERGENCE

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

Latin America suffered a profound state crisis in the 1980s, which prompted not only the wave of macroeconomic and deregulation reforms known as the Washington Consensus, but also a wide variety of institutional or 'second generation' reforms. 'The State of State Reform in Latin America' reviews and assesses the outcomes of these less studied institutional reforms. This book examines four major areas of institutional reform: a. political institutions and the state organization; b. fiscal institutions, such as budget, tax and decentralization institutions; c. public institutions in charge of sectoral economic policies (financial, industrial, and infrastructure); and d. social sector institutions (pensions, social protection, and education). In each of these areas, the authors summarize the reform objectives, describe and measure their scope, assess the main outcomes, and identify the obstacles for implementation, especially those of an institutional nature.

The countries of the Caribbean region benefit from a number of preferential trade arrangements. In addition to the industrialized countrys' General System of Preferences (GSP) which are applicable to most developing countries, there are some very special arrangements formulated to promote exports from the Caribbean countries -- the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) of the United States, CARIBCAN of Canada, and the much older Lome Conventions of the European Communities, which includes the Caribbean as well as most African and some Pacific countries. Yet, in spite of this preferential treatment, the Caribbean export performance has been worse than the performance of the developing countries as a whole. This report examines the Caribbean export performance in the 1980s in some detail, analyzes the possible reasons behind this performance, and presents some recommendations to improve it. The scope of the analysis in this report is limited to the member countries of the Caribbean Group for Cooperation in Economic Development. This report not only has a Caribbean perspective, it examines all three major arrangements - the CBI, CARIBCAN, and Lome Convention in the environment of both groups and specific exporters in the three different markets. In this way, the greatly varying performances can lead to insights on export performance and ways to improve it.

The analysis in the book suggests that LAC countries are facing substantial challenges related to climate change but have tools at their disposal to seize the opportunities that the climate change presents. To maximize opportunities and minimize the risks LAC countries will need to improve flexibility and adaptability of their economies. Policies aimed at supporting the reallocation of labor and capital across sectors, investing in basic skills and human capital, improving transparency and economic governance to encourage investment in technology and know-how, and creating fiscal space to manage the climate transition would help LAC countries position themselves to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the climate transition.