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Chile se convirtió en el de mayor ingreso per cápita en la región y el de mejor índice de Desarrollo Humano, muy cerca del promedio de los miembros de la OCDE. Es el país de la región que más avances ha hecho en Objetivos de desarrollo Sostenible y el número 31 del mundo. Pero aun cuando persisten desafíos. Las protestas de 2019 llevaron a momentos difíciles y de la crisis surgió una oportunidad para realizar nuevas e importantes transformaciones. Afortunadamente, Chile tiene experiencia al respecto: un historial de reformas, profundas y relevantes. Si hoy son líderes regionales es gracias a esas iniciativas de cambio y no a pesar de ellas, en términos económicos, de gobernanza, sociales y ambientales. Pasado el momento más crítico de la pandemia, es tiempo de retomar la senda. Chile tardaría en cerrar varias de sus brechas muestra que en materia de pobreza le tomaría 27 años. Los mismos 27 años demoraría el sector financiero en cerrar sus brechas. Un poco más lejos están los desafíos de género (31 años), protección social y trabajo (34) y salud (35). Los mayores retos se encuentran en las áreas de infraestructura (casi 91 años para cerrar las brechas actuales), medio ambiente (116 años) y deuda y política económica (228). Este documento plantea recomendaciones puntuales para que Chile crezca de manera sostenible y con equidad. Para ello hemos dividido las recomendaciones en dos grandes propósitos: vida digna y, por otro lado, sociedad próspera y moderna.

Durante las últimas décadas Chile ha sido resaltado como ejemplo a seguir en el manejo y solvencia de su política fiscal. Ese comportamiento había permitido reducir la deuda pública y mantener una política fiscal evitando ser procíclica como había ocurrido durante decenios anteriores. Sin embargo y pese a continuas mejoras institucionales, en el último tiempo la solidez fiscal ha perdido fuerza, en especial tras la crisis social y pandemia reciente. Este documento revisa la institucionalidad fiscal de Chile a lo largo de las últimas dos décadas, destacando sus sucesivas reformas y mostrando los problemas que ha venido enfrentando recientemente. En base a ello se proponen lineamientos que permitirían reforzar su institucionalidad para preservar la sostenibilidad de las finanzas públicas.

Migration is one of the strategies used by populations to adapt to natural shocks and also to respond to economic policies. Climate change will probably have an impact on the productivity of factors and on the health of the population of the Latin America and Caribbean region, triggering migrations. In addition, policies aimed at reducing emissions (like carbon taxes) will change relative prices and the remuneration of factors and, in turn, will alter the allocation of labor between urban and rural areas. This paper explores the potential quantitative relevance of those population movements using a CGE version of the Harris-Todaro model. Two paradigmatic cases are considered: i) domestic or internal migrations, focusing on the case of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and ii) international migrations, analyzing the displacement of population from Bolivia and Paraguay to Argentina.

Growing vehicle use and congestion externalities have led many to consider alternative congestion pricing mechanisms, as road pricing often has high infrastructural costs and faces public opposition. This paper explores the role of parking taxation in reducing congestion by considering a natural experiment created by the progressive January 1, 2012 Chicago parking tax increase. Exploiting differences in vehicle use across income groups, it is estimated that the approximately $2 a day parking tax increase led to a 4-6 percent reduction in total vehicle trips in high-income areas, with the largest response seen on roads more heavily used by commuters. Also found are corresponding increases in use of public transit and a 3. 1 percent aggregate reduction in vehicle trips. It is concluded that parking taxes can help mitigate congestion externalities, although they are no more than about half as effective as more efficient congestion tolls.

This study estimates the effects of the 1970 Ancash earthquake on human capital accumulation on the affected and subsequent generation, 37 years after the shock, using the Peruvian censuses of 1993 and 2007. The main finding is that males affected by the earthquake in utero completed on average 0. 5 years less schooling while females affected by the earthquake completed 0. 8 years less schooling. Surprisingly, those whose mothers were affected at birth by the earthquake have 0. 4 less years of education, while those whose fathers were affected by the earthquake at birth have no effects on their education. The evaluation of other outcomes also suggests that the level of welfare of the affected individuals has been negatively impacted in the long run. The present investigation supports previous literature on shocks in early childhood, providing evidence of the existence of intergenerational transmission of shocks.

This paper examines the effectiveness of carbon taxes on macroeconomic performance when manufacturing firms have the opportunity to change their scale of operation and degree of formality. The hypothesis is that when tax evasion or elusion is possible, it cannot be ruled out that emissions increase rather than decrease due to the reallocation of resources from the rest of manufacturing towards informal small-scale firms. When informality is high, industry could adapt to carbon taxes by reducing the scale of operation of big firms and increasing the number of small firms. However, when taxes are enforceable in all types of firms, there is a cost in terms of GDP and employment, since small-scale firms are more labor intensive. For numerical experiments, two CGE models calibrated for Argentina and Mexico are used. The 'domestic leakage' is found to be more relevant for Argentina than for Mexico.

This is an update and revision of our 2009 study. Using a broad dataset and an original methodology, this paper reports composite development gaps across economic, social and institutional sectors. We define development gap as the distance between the observed and the expected development level of a country. The gaps are indicators of areas where development needs are bigger. Although we estimate the development gaps for all countries with available data, we focus the analysis of our results in five Southern Cone countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.

This paper studies the allocation of total disaster risk reduction public spending among regions in Peru. The main objective of this work is to identify the main determinants of the distribution of these resources, and for this purpose an index of historical physical impacts of natural disasters, social vulnerability, and institutional capacity was created. It is found that historical impacts of climatological disasters are positively correlated with the per capita amount received by region in order to prevent future natural disasters. Impacts of geological disaster, on the other hand, affect the amount of executed and budgeted resources used to cope with the effects of past disasters. The prevention expenditure is mainly driven by climatological effects on the agriculture sector. Additionally, results confirm that higher social vulnerability is a main determinant of the distribution of prevention spending but conditioned on being affected by climatological disasters. Institutional capacity seems to define only the amount of recovery expenditure, positively for regions more seriously affected by geological disasters and negatively for regions devastated by climatological disasters.

In addition to the morbidity and mortality concerns of outdoor air pollution, studies have shown that air pollution also generates problems for children`s cognitive performance and human capital formation. High concentrations of pollutants can affect children`s learning process by exacerbating respiratory illnesses, fatigue, absenteeism and attention problems. The purpose of this work is to analyze the possible contemporary effects of PM10 and other different air pollutants on standardized test scores in Chile. It examines results for 3,880 schools in the Metropolitan, Valparaiso and O'Higgins regions for children in fourth, eight and tenth grades between 1997 and 2012. Data for particulate matter (PM10 and PM2. 5), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxide (NOx) and ozone (O3) were interpolated at school level using a kriging methodology. The results suggest that higher annual P M10 and O3 levels are clearly associated with a reduction in test scores. Nonetheless, as of 2012 many municipalities in these Chilean regions are still exceeding the annual P M10 international standard quality norm (50 micrograms per cubic meter) by 15 micrograms per cubic meter on average. Efforts to reduce pollution below this norm in the most polluted municipalities would account for improvements in reading and math test scores of 3.5 percent and 3.1 percent of a standard deviation, respectively.

This paper focuses on the question of whether the magnitude of long-established environmentally related taxes (ERT) is related to countries environmental performance. While environmental taxes efficiencies have previously been discussed, those taxes contribution to reducing pollution and improving environmental quality has not been fully explored. This paper therefore analyzes the effectiveness of environmental taxes by examining the environmental performance of 50 countries from all regions in association with the amount of revenues from environmentally related taxes each country collects. Using a cross-section regression and a panel dynamic regression, the paper finds that countries with higher revenues from these types of taxes also exhibit higher reductions in CO2 emission, PM10 emissions, and energy consumption and production from fossil sources.

The increased occurrence of extreme weather conditions leading to drought is a key development challenge. This paper studies how these extreme events interact with the political process at the local level using rich administrative data for drought declarations and mayoral elections in Brazil. While accounting for current and historical rainfall patterns, the paper finds that that: i) municipalities led by a mayor affiliated with the President¿s party are more likely to receive formal drought declarations prior to the municipal election; and ii) receiving a drought declaration reinforces the electoral advantage of incumbent mayors running for reelection. These results are robust to the inclusion of a rich set of controls for municipal attributes.

Environmental taxes have been discussed as one of the main mechanisms to deal with environmental problems. Nonetheless, instruments of this type have rarely been implemented, and the adoption of new or higher environmental taxes has faced resistance in some countries. The purpose of this work is to identify one possible political answer to why adoption of environmental taxes varies. One explanation is that legislatures' ideological position affects the degree of usage of taxes generally and environ- mental taxes in particular. For example, right-wing parties tend to be less associated with environmental concerns and more associated with lower government intervention. This paper presents evidence that reflects this relationship, showing the positive association of more left-wing legislatures with higher levels of environmental taxation. A panel of data for 37 developed and developing countries over 16 years is used considering the percentage of total revenue from environmentally related taxes, the ratio of this revenue to total energy use and tax levels in industry and household sectors. The results show that most of these impacts involve environmentally related taxes in the industry sector. Proportional representation electoral systems and high seat concentration by few parties appear to be necessary conditions for the negative relation of right-wing ideology with environmental taxes.

Mobilizing sufficient resources is essential for supporting environmental activities in developing countries, and cofinancing is generally considered an important tool to help developing countries increase the resources they need. Moreover, cofinancing should increase ownership of projects by local authorities while improving accountability. The literature, however, has not explored why certain projects receive higher levels of cofinancing than others. This paper attempts to fill this gap by examining the cofinancing ratio and its determinants using projects financed by the GEF Trust Fund. The empirical results confirm that the rules of the fund, requiring different minimum cofinancing ratios by size and focal area of the GEF projects, do matter. Other important factors include funds' origins (foreign vs. domestic), types of cofinancing sources (reimbursable vs. nonreimbursable) and the particular GEF agencies involved.

This paper provides a rationale for developing countries to announce future credible commitments to reduce GHG emissions even if these are not to materialize in the short run, and for domestic reasons only. A simple framework is presented in which it is shown that it may be costly for an economy to transition from high to low emissions; and that, if climate policy eventually will be enacted, then it may be better for countries to commit earlier and therefore eliminate the uncertainty for the private sector to invest appropriately in clean technologies. In particular, conditions are shown under which the private investor prefers a pre-announced climate policy, and how this policy affects investment decisions and the deployment of clean technologies.

The existence of populist regimes led by outsiders is not new in history. In this paper a simple framework is presented that shows how and why a populist outsider can be elected to office, and under what conditions he is more likely to be elected. The results show that countries with a higher income and wealth concentration are more likely to elect populist outsiders than countries where income and wealth are more equally distributed. It is also shown that elections with a runoff are less likely to bring these populist outsiders into office.