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This paper assesses progress made in elementary education in Latin America from 1990-2000. Besides examining completion rates, it looks at four critical indicators: the extent to which repetition rates have declined over the decade; the extent of timely access and on-time ages of elementary school students; the level or elementary school students' learning achievement; and changes in expenditures and other inputs into elementary education. The paper focuses on four countries (Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and Honduras), which represent a wide spectrum of education conditions in the region. It uses data collected from a variety of sources, with the main criterion being reliable observations from 1999-2000. Results indicate that overall, the region has made progress in elementary education. More children complete their elementary schooling. They are also more likely to begin their schooling at appropriate ages, and they are less likely to repeat a grade. Most countries have increased their investments in education. However, 18 percent of children in the region do not complete 6 years of elementary education, and 16 percent repeat a grade. Progress in terms of learning has been slow or nonexistent. (Contains 29 bibliographic references.) (SM)

The gender earning gap in Latin America poses a significant obstacle to achieving gender equality and sustainable development. In the Dominican Republic, this gap is concentrated in the informal sector, among self-employed workers, and in regions with higher female labor force participation. Despite women often having a better labor profile than men, the gender gap persists, indicating the presence of gender biases. Potential factors contributing to this gap may include inadequate laws, cognitive biases, and relative childcare costs that often go unnoticed in society. To analyze the gender earning gap in the Dominican Republic between 2000 and 2019, we utilized the National Labor Force Surveys conducted by the National Statistics Office (ONE) and harmonized by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). We present two models for estimating this gap: the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition and the Ñopo model. Despite a temporal analysis, we did not observe a clear trend of reduction or increase in the gender earning gap during the analyzed period. This suggests that additional efforts are needed to understand this disparity.

The 2020 Annual Business Review (ABR) provides an overview of the IDB's performance on sovereign-guaranteed outputs and lending program priorities. The ABR identifies trend deviations from IDB portfolio targets to support Bank managements efforts to identify and implement corrective measures. This edition compiles data for all quarters in 2020.

2020 was an unprecedented year for Central America and the Dominican Republic. The effect of the global COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated by the impact of Hurricanes Eta and Iota in some countries, caused the greatest economic contraction the region has undergone in its recent history - surpassing the debt crisis of the 1980s and the international financial crisis of 2009. In 2020, the IDB Group helped the countries in the region respond to these emergencies through approvals that exceeded US$ 4,900 million and disbursements of more than US$ 4,327 million, both reaching historical records. This report highlights the Groups main activities in Central America and the Dominican Republic in 2020 at the regional and country level.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sets global standards for sustainability reporting, relying on best practices for reporting on a range of economic, environmental, and social impacts. This is the IDBs fifth GRI annex, prepared as a supplement to the IDB Sustainability Report. The annex reports on both corporate and operational topics using standardized indicators. The following material topics are included in the annex: active ownership, anticorruption and ethics, biodiversity, climate resilience, employment and labor relations, energy, engagement and coordination, feedback mechanisms, financial inclusion, gender equality and diversity, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, health and safety, human rights, indirect economic impacts, market presence, material use, monitoring and evaluation, responsible portfolio, supply chain management, training and education, waste, and water.

This report is the second of two volumes which together constitute the Inter-American Development Bank's 2020 Annual Report. This report contains the management's discussion and analysis of the Bank's ordinary capital and financial statements.

In 2020, the Inter-American Development Bank kicked off the new decade faced with a novel, unprecedented challenge: the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, as the IDB Group sought to help the region's governments and companies navigate the social, economic, and health-related implications of this crisis, it did so with the support of a robust partnership network and a track record of collaborating with partners to amplify its impact. In 2020, the IDB Group was able to further leverage partnerships in this period of great transformation, continuing its efforts to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and confront the new obstacles generated by the pandemic in partnership with governments, companies, philanthropic actors, academic institutions, and others. The pages of this report provide greater insight into these efforts, revealing partnerships to be an unrivaled tool for transforming challenges and uncertainty into opportunities for growth.

The Quarterly Business Review (QBR) provides an overview of the IDB's performance on sovereign-guaranteed outputs and lending program priorities. The QBR identifies trend deviations from IDB portfolio targets to support Bank management efforts to identify and implement corrective measures. This edition compiles data for the third quarter of 2020.

In December 2019, Suriname became the second country in the world to submit the update of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) to the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Despite being a country with a negative balance of emissions resulting from its 93% of forest cover, Suriname increased its ambition by including two additional sectors (agriculture, and transportation). These sectors represent 70% of the country's GHG emissions. In addition, the country reaffirmed its commitment to maintain its forest cover and to increase the incorporation of renewable energies by 10% compared to the first version of the NDC. The process of updating the NDCs in Suriname was supported at all times by the IDB's NDC Invest platform.

En la región, el Grupo Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) lidera la transformación del sector transporte impulsando iniciativas que utilizan la tecnología para transformar los sistemas de transporte tradicionales en transporte urbano sostenible. Desde 2013, el BID ha estado trabajando para superar esas barreras y abrir oportunidades con el sector público y privado e identificar modelos de negocios apropiados y movilizar inversiones para alternativas de transporte limpio. Desde entonces, un sólido equipo de colaboración de cinco Divisiones (Transporte, Energía, Ciudades, Mercados Capitales y Cambio Climático) y nuestros socios del sector privado, BID INVEST y BID Lab están brindando asistencia técnica para apoyar a los gobiernos y las instituciones del sector privado en la implementación de tecnologías innovadoras.

Country Disaster Risk Profile for The Bahamas presents the “Historical Disaster Loss Assessment and Probabilistic Hazard Assessment”, “Exposure and Vulnerability Assessment” and “Country Disaster Risk Profile”.

One of the key strategic activities of disaster risk management (DRM) at the country or regional level is the assessment of the risk of disaster associated with extreme natural events, which requires the use of reliable methodologies that allow an adequate estimation and quantification of potential losses in a given exposed time. Although there are several international methodologies for detailed risk assessment for different types of natural hazards, few of them allow analysis at the country level for two main reasons: first, there is a lack of detailed information that prevents the formation of a robust database to describe the exposure and, second, there is a lack of an integrated and consistent methodology to assess the probabilistic modelling of different natural hazards, considering simultaneously the vulnerability of the exposed elements and their associated risk. To achieve the overall goal of identifying and quantifying catastrophic risk, it is necessary to include relevant natural hazards in an integrated manner, considering both their individual intensities and frequencies of occurrence. Moreover, the approach should capture the main features of the information of the exposure model of infrastructure assets and components. These will define for every class of component, its corresponding vulnerability for each one of the hazards considered. The vulnerability representation, together with the hazard, will define the associated risk. The assessment will be undertaken using a consistent probabilistic based model which considers both the hazard intensity distribution and the frequency of occurrence, in addition to their associated uncertainties. The resulting probabilistic risk parameters shall be interpreted considering the defined exposure resolution and the inevitable limitations of the information used, both in terms of quality and completeness.

The second document in the Best Practices Series of the PLAC Network provides a practical set of guidelines to help regulators and supervisors design and implement legal, regulatory and supervision frameworks of the pension pay-out or decumulation phase in order to incorporate a comprehensive risk assessment model. The guidelines seek to be consistent with other standards and guidelines, but adapted to the particular circumstances of the member countries of the PLAC Network.