Beyond Survival: Protecting Households from Health Shocks in Latin America breaks new ground in the ongoing debate about health finance and financial protection from the costs of health care. The evidence and discussion support the need to consider financial protection, in addition to health status, as a policy objective when setting priorities for health systems.
This book reviews the Latin American experience with health reform in the last 20 years and the fundamentals of health system financing, using new evidence to show the magnitude and mechanisms that determine the impoverishing effects of health events (diseases, accidents, and those of the life cycle). It provides options for policy makers on how to protect, and help households to protect themselves, against this impoverishment.
The authors use empirical evidence from six case studies commissioned for this report, on Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Mexico. This book provides policy makers with a solid conceptual basis for decisions on the contents of mandatory health insurance benefit packages, choices of financing mechanisms, and the roles of public policy in this field.
Beyond Survival provides an in-depth analysis of, and organizational alternatives for, risk pooling and health insurance for financial protection. It analyzes the urgent need to extend risk pooling to the informal sector, the challenges for current social insurance arrangements, and options for policy makers to effectively extend risk pooling to the informal sector.

Beyond Survival: Protecting Households from Health Shocks in Latin America breaks new ground in the ongoing debate about health finance and financial protection from the costs of health care. The evidence and discussion support the need to consider financial protection, in addition to health status, as a policy objective when setting priorities for health systems.
This book reviews the Latin American experience with health reform in the last 20 years and the fundamentals of health system financing, using new evidence to show the magnitude and mechanisms that determine the impoverishing effects of health events (diseases, accidents, and those of the life cycle). It provides options for policy makers on how to protect, and help households to protect themselves, against this impoverishment.
The authors use empirical evidence from six case studies commissioned for this report, on Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Mexico. This book provides policy makers with a solid conceptual basis for decisions on the contents of mandatory health insurance benefit packages, choices of financing mechanisms, and the roles of public policy in this field.
Beyond Survival provides an in-depth analysis of, and organizational alternatives for, risk pooling and health insurance for financial protection. It analyzes the urgent need to extend risk pooling to the informal sector, the challenges for current social insurance arrangements, and options for policy makers to effectively extend risk pooling to the informal sector.

This report focuses on the challenge of youth engagement in school and at work. It shows that youth prospects in the labor market are dimmed by policies favoring existing workers. Also, youth are often ill equipped to meet an increasingly challenging labor market. The report discusses new policies, targeted at youth, that Brazil could prioritize.

What to do about the extent of unregulated informal employment and the size of the shadow economy is a dilemma that has been gaining urgency, particularly in Europe's periphery. The forces that accompany globalization put a premium on mobility and skill-renewal. Rapid population ageing will require that people work longer and be far more productive. To achieve this, social and economic institutions have to be more pro-employment, encouraging greater participation in the formal economy. And looking ahead, public financial resources will be increasingly scarce, giving urgency to measures that can significantly and sustainably increase tax revenue. This book is about workers in Europe who earn a living working full or part-time in untaxed markets for goods, services and labor. Their activities are not registered as part of the economy, and because they go unrecorded, they are also unregulated. This makes them illegal although not in essence criminal. Some call this the underground economy, black market or the shadow economy. Widespread informal employment in the shadow economy posses problems for individuals and their families, but it is also a problem for firms and society. This volume presents the rationale and steps policy makers in the EU's newest member countries should take to bring as much economic activity in from the shadow economy as they can. The authors venture a general conclusion: Although it may be necessary to improve the structural incentives created by the structure of taxation, labor market regulation, and social protection policies, doing so is not sufficient to achieve real improvement. As important, is a government's credibility in the eyes of working people in carrying out the state s unique and critical role of providing and maintaining public goods. The process of improving governance and increasing institutional credibility is long and difficult, but key to changing the circumstances that lead people into the shadowy unregulated and untaxed markets. Deriving specific policy guidance and recommendations from rigorous analysis using administrative and unit-level survey data the book draws a set of general policy suggestions for EU members, old and new, as well as those who aspire to join the Union. Although aimed specifically at emerging Europe, this policy guidance will resonate with decision makers in middle and upper-middle income countries in other parts of the world."

Empirical analysis of two decades of pioneering pension and social security reform in Latin America and the Caribbean shows that much has been achieved, but that critical challenges remain. In tackling this unfinished agenda, a great deal can be learned from the reform experience of countries in the region. Keeping the Promise, produced by the chief economist's office in the Latin America and Caribbean Region at the World Bank, evaluates policy reforms in 12 countries, points to successes and shortcomings, and proposes priorities and options for future reform. ""Keeping the Promise provides a timely assessment of two decades of pension reform experience-with a wealth of new data, and empirical evaluation of reformed social security systems. Many economists and policymakers will not be persuaded by some of the main conclusions and recommendations-such as the supposed failure to increase coverage, and the call for strengthening a pay-as-you-go defined-benefit scheme for poverty prevention-but they will welcome the book's critical appraisal. This is required reading for pension specialists and policymakers in Latin America and beyond.""-Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel, Chief of Economic Research, Central Bank of Chile ""A heavyweight analysis of the Latin American pension revolution which raises important questions about the optimal scale of compulsory saving when redesigning pension systems. "" -Paul Wallace, The Economist