Image by DFAT on Flickr Voice and Agency: empowering women and girls for shared prosperity is a major new report by the World Bank that shines a spotlight on the value of empowerment, the patterns of constraints that limit their realization, and the associated costs, not only to individual women but to their families, communities, and societies. It highlights promising policies and interventions, and it identifies priority areas where further research and more and better data and evidence are needed.

In November 2008, Colombian authorities dismantled a network of Ponzi schemes, making hundreds of thousands of investors lose tens of millions of dollars throughout the country. Using original data on the geographical incidence of the Ponzi schemes, this paper estimates the impact of their break down on crime. We find that the crash of Ponzi schemes differentially exacerbated crime in affected districts. Confirming the intuition of the standard economic model of crime, this effect is only present in places with relatively weak judicial and law enforcement institutions, and with little access to consumption smoothing mechanisms such as microcredit. In addition, we show that, with the exception of economically-motivated felonies such as robbery, violent crime is not affected by the negative shock.

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The increase in access to digital technologies is opening up opportunities for governments in Latin America and the Caribbean to offer digital public services. However, there is scarce evidence regarding the benefits and costs of potential projects which makes it difficult for governments in the region to prioritize digital projects for implementation. As part of the report titled “Digitalizing Public Services: Opportunities for Latin America and the Caribbean,” produced by the Inter-American Development Bank (Cristia and Vlaicu, 2022), a set of cost-benefit analyses of the digital public services were performed. The present document complements the mentioned report by presenting the methodology, assumptions, and results of these cost-benefit analyses. To increase the comparability of the results across digital public services evaluated, common assumptions and a standardized methodology were used. Moreover, contextual conditions were fixed across projects by estimating results for a base country, Peru. The robustness of the results were examined by replicating the analysis for Chile, El Salvador, and Jamaica. Digital public services were evaluated in three sectors: education, health and government administrative services (e.g. production of identity cards). For each sector, the benefits and costs of two digital projects were estimated. For some these digital projects, only one policy option was assessed but, in other cases, several policy options were analyzed. A total of 11 policy options were assessed as part of this exercise. Results indicate that, in general, the policy options analyzed produced positive net present values. However, there is wide variation in the net present value across policy options suggesting that governments should carefully evaluate which digital public services they should prioritize for implementation.

This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project on 'Structural transformation and inclusive growth in Vietnam'.