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La economía colombiana no es materia exclusiva de especialistas o iniciados. De forma clara y elocuente, este libro explica los asuntos que más nos afectan: salarios, pensiones, salud, educación, impuestos, medioambiente, tasas de interés, inflación, mercado laboral (con un revelador enfoque de género), crecimiento, desplazados, inmigración, y lo hace a la luz de los efectos de la pandemia y de la crisis social. Temas familiares en mayor o menor medida para todos, pues son parte de la vida diaria, que es donde se encuentran tanto las raíces del descontento como los nuevos futuros para los jóvenes. En la actualización que presentamos, Eduardo Lora hace una contribución única a la divulgación del conocimiento sobre la realidad colombiana y al debate nacional sobre las políticas públicas que necesita el país.

Encuentre su lugar en la economía colombiana. Con un lenguaje directo y cifras sencillas, este libro le ayudará a responder preguntas como estas: ¿Sabe quién tiene el poder económico y cómo dispone de él? ¿Le gustaría entender por qué hay tanta desigualdad en Colombia? ¿Le han hablado de las implicaciones económicas y sociales del machismo? ¿Conseguirá usted una pensión? ¿Cree que está pagando demasiados impuestos? Más que una introducción a la economía, este libro es una introducción al país para el ciudadano común. Eduardo Lora es uno de los economistas más notables de su generación. Ha dedicado su vida al estudio de los fenómenos económicos y sociales en entidades como Fedesarrollo, el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) y la Universidad de Harvard. Este es su primer libro de divulgación.

This exciting new volume provides an up-to-date overview of the current state of taxation in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, its main reform needs, and possible reform strategies that take into account the likely economic, institutional, and political constraints on the reform process.

A growing number of cities around the world have established systems for monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective information with subjective opinions and cover a wide variety of topics. This book assesses a method that takes advantage of both types of information and offers criteria to identify and rank the issues of potential importance for urban dwellers. This method—which combines the so-called'hedonic price'and'life satisfaction'approaches to value public goods—was tested in pilot studies in six Latin American cities: Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, Medellín, Montevideo, and San José of Costa Rica. It provides valuable insights to address key questions such as, • Which urban problems have the greatest impact on people's opinions of city management and the most widespread effects on their lives? • Do gaps between perception and reality vary from one area of the city to another, especially between high- and low-income neighborhoods? • Where can homebuilders most feasibly seek solutions to problems such as inadequate road infrastructure, a lack of recreational areas, or poor safety conditions? • Which problems should government authorities address first, in light of their impact on the well-being of various groups of individuals and given private actors'abilities to respond? • Which homeowners benefit the most from public infrastructure or services? • When can or should property taxes be used to finance the provision of certain services—or the solution of certain problems?'The Quality of Life in Latin American Cities: Markets and Perception'proposes a monitoring system that is easy to operate and that entails reasonable costs but also has a solid conceptual basis. Long the ideal of many scholars and practitioners, such a system may soon become a reality and have the potential to make a significant contribution to the decision-making processes in any city concerned with the well-being of its residents.

The'quality of life'concept of quality of life is a broad one. It incorporates basic needs but also extends beyond them to include capabilities, the'livability'of the environment, and life appreciation and happiness. Latin America's diversity in culture and levels of development provide a laboratory for studying how quality of life varies with a number of objective and subjective measures. These measures range from income levels to job insecurity and satisfaction, to schooling attainment and satisfaction, to measured and self-assessed health, among others.Paradox and Perception greatly improves our understanding of the determinants of well-being in Latin America based on a broad'quality of life'concept that challenges some standard assumptions in economics, including those about the relationship between happiness and income.The authors'analysis builds upon a number of new approaches in economics, particularly those related to the study of happiness and finds a number of paradoxes as the region's respondents evaluate their well-being. These include the paradox of unhappy growth at the macroeconomic level, happy peasants and frustrated achievers at the microlevel, and surprisingly high levels of satisfaction with public services among the region's poorest. They also have important substantive links with several of the region's realities, such as high levels of income inequality, volatile macroeconomic performance, and low expectations of public institutions and faith in the capacity of the state to deliver. Identifying these perceptions, paradoxes, and their causes will contribute to the crafting of better public policies, as well as to our understanding of why'populist'politics still pervade in much of the region.