We assessed the effects of female political representation on mortality among children younger than age five in Brazil and the extent to which this effect operates through coverage with conditional cash transfers and primary care services. We combined data on under-five mortality rates with data on women elected as mayors or representatives in state and federal legislatures for 3,167 municipalities during 2000–15. Results from fixed-effects regression models suggest that the election of a female mayor and increases in the shares of women elected to state legislatures and to the federal Chamber of Deputies to 20 percent or more were significantly associated with declines in under-five mortality. Increasing the political representation of women was likely associated with beneficial effects on child mortality through pathways that expanded access to primary health care and conditional cash transfer programs.

The governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic left Latin America and the Caribbean economies with increased levels of sovereign debt as a percentage of output, bringing up the question of debt sustainability in the region. The literature has identified two testable conditions on the fiscal reaction function for debt sustainability: i) a positive response of primary balances to debt (Bohn, 1995) and ii) the response of primary balances to debt should be higher than the growth adjusted interest rate (Ghosh et al., 2013). This paper revisits these conditions, both from the theoretical and empirical perspective. It introduces a new “implicit growth” measure which is the relevant one for the debt-to-GDP ratio dynamics. It also tests empirically both conditions for economies in the region. The results suggest that debt is likely sustainable in the region, although it cannot be assured at a 95 percent confidence level. A deep look at the causes of this results pointed towards fiscal fatigue, the fact that primary balances become less responsive to debt levels the higher the latter are. At post-pandemic debt levels sustainability is far from certain. The results here indicate decisive action is required to ensure debt will fall back to prudent levels.

Despite the sharp contraction in portfolio flows in March 2020, only six of 22 Latin American and Caribbean countries analyzed suffered a sudden stop in net capital flows during the COVID crisis. Outflows were the main driver of these sudden stops, as residents decided to increase their savings abroad. In other cases, external borrowing was crucial to avoid sudden stops. Without sovereign debt issuance or multilateral lending, sudden stops would have been considerably more widespread. Strong fundamentals are critical to maintaining access to external sovereign debt markets. Countries that suffered sudden stops had weaker pre-crisis macroeconomic indicators.

External capital accounts suffered during the COVID-19 crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean, but perhaps surprisingly the impacts were less severe than in previous crises. Gross capital inflows offset the outflows of residents, in sharp contrast to the global financial crisis of 2008/09 when residents repatriation of capital countered withdrawals from non-residents. In general, the result was relatively stable net capital inflows and modest current account adjustments. Still, some countries that had seen inflows fall prior to the crisis, reflecting weaker fundamentals, suffered Sudden Stops in net capital flows. Given accommodating global monetary policy, sound fundamentals ensured access to liquid international capital markets, reducing the impacts of Sudden Stops during the pandemic.