Samuel Franco

Measuring inequality of opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Over the past decade, faster growth and smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin Americas poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and policy debates from poverty toward inequality, something to be expected in a region that exhibits the worlds most regressive distribution of development outcomes such as income, land ownership, and educational achievement. This book is a breakthrough in the measurement of human opportunity. It builds sophisticated formulas to answer a rather simple question: how much influence do personal circumstances have on the access that children get to the basic services that are necessary for a productive life? Needless to say, producing a methodology to measure human opportunity, and applying it across countries in one region, is just a first step. On the one hand, technical discussions and scientific vetting will continue, and refinements will surely follow. On the other, applying the new tool to a single country will allow for adjustments that make the findings much more useful to its policy realities. And fascinating comparative lessons could be learned by measuring human opportunity in developed countries across, say, the states of the United States or the nations of Europe. But the main message this book delivers remains a powerful one: it is possible to make equity a central purpose, if not the very definition, of development. That is, perhaps, its most important contribution.

A Short-Term Cost- Effectiveness Evaluation of Better-Quality Daycare Centers

Studies of the effects of pre-school programs on child development in developing countries have found scant impact. This study was conducted to reconcile the importance of daycare for child development with the empirical estimates of small effects. Using a random sample of 500 children from 100 daycare centers in the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the study combines a flexible function relating child development to daycare center quality. A hedonic cost function permits an evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of better-quality daycare centers. The study finds that the developmental age of children attending high-quality services is greater than that of children attending low-quality centers. It also finds that quality improvement can be measured in a number of ways, with different cost implications or impacts on child development.