This work aims to empirically study the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in a model that takes into account the tourism sector. We use two novel approaches in this framework: an own developed environmental legal index and an instrumental quantile regression methodology. Our study comprises 18 Latin American countries between 1995 and 2013. We have found that tourism activity causes carbon emissions increases but, because of the restrictions imposed by environmental regulations, further tourism activity can mitigate these adverse environmental effects, mainly in high-polluted countries. These results suggest a step forward in the tourism-extended EKC estimations: they indicate the need for analysis considering the heterogeneities in environmental conditions across countries and the role of environmental regulation within this framework.

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Este trabajo estudia la evolución de las brechas salariales por nivel educativo y su relación con la estructura productiva en 16 países de América Latina, con base en microdatos de encuestas de hogares e información de cuentas nacionales en el periodo de 1991 a 2015. La evidencia sugiere que el cambio en la estructura productiva está correlacionado estrechamente con la dinámica de la desigualdad salarial en la región. En particular, cuando crece la participación en el valor agregado de los sectores más intensivos en trabajo calificado, aumentan significativamente las brechas salariales por educación.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Brazil while the poorest 40 percent of the population was still recovering from the 2014-16 crisis. After boosting Latin America's reduction in poverty and inequality for the previous decade, Brazil's 2014-16 crisis and recovery are a stark departure from the previous decade as Brazil's inclusive growth turned significantly regressive. As millions of jobs were lost, Brazil's expansive social protection system was unable to effectively serve as a countercyclical protection system. This note analyses the recently released household data from 2012 through 2019 to better understand the severity of the 2014-16 crisis across income groups, as well as the uneven and slow recovery experienced following this crisis 2. The analysis shows that, during the domestic 2014-16 crisis, Brazil was unable to replicate its earlier successful protection of welfare as over 4.6 million Brazilians fell into extreme poverty between 2014 and 2017. Poverty rates grew from 22.8 percent in 2014 to 23.8 percent in 2016, while extreme poverty grew from 5.6 percent to 7.7 percent between 2014 and 2017. As of 2019 the recovery had yet to reach the poorest-this tendency of crisis-level poverty rates to resist the recovery is found throughout the five regions of Brazil until 2018. As of 2019, the income of the poorest 40 percent remained below its pre-crisis level. A sharp reversal in shared prosperity 3 during the crisis and regressive income growth has fueled the increase in poverty and inequality. Between 2014 and 2019 the income of the poorest 40 percent fell at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent. During this period, the income of the average Brazilian grew by 0.3 percent per year. From its lowest levels since the twenty-first century, inequality rose sharply in 2016, when inequality grew by 1.5 Gini points in one year-the largest single year jump in inequality since at least the early 1990s-and continued to grow until 2018. All told, the Gini coefficient grew from a low of 52.5 in 2015 to 55.0 in 2018. If income growth during this period had been evenly spread 1 This brief includes both internationally comparable indicators and indicators based on the official income aggregate, as defined by IBGE, that are not internationally comparable. 2 Due to a methodological change in the survey series published by IBGE, there has been a limited understanding of the full impact of the 2014-16 economic crisis in Brazil. In October 2019, IBGE published the comparable income series from 2012 through 2018, allowing for a first look at the poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity trends during this critical period. The data for 2019 were published in May 2020. 3 Shared prosperity is an indicator defined as the income growth of the poorest 40 percent.

We explore the role of social mobility as a driver of economic development. First, we map the geography of intergenerational mobility of education for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over time. Then, through a new weighting procedure that considers the participation of cohorts to the economy in each year, we estimate the impact of changes in mobility on regional economic indicators, such as income per capita, poverty, child mortality, and luminosity. Our findings show that increasing social mobility had a significant and robust effect on the development of Latin American regions.