Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as stay-at-home orders continue to be the main policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic in countries with limited or slow vaccine rollout.Often, NPI are managed or implemented at the sub-national level, yet little information exists on within country variation in NPI policies. We focus on Latin America, a COVID-19 epicenter, and collect and analyze daily subnational data on public health measures in Argentina,

What causes stark differences in living standards between subnational units? What can countries do to lessen such variations? This article argues that there is an aspect of national policy frameworks that impacts subnational provision of social services: the sensitivity of policy to the particularities of place. Place-sensitive policies make adaptations to the way social services are organized and provided across a country, so that they are better equipped to deal with the different characteristics of places and better support their well-being. When policies are place-sensitive, subnational provision is facilitated in poor, rural, and marginal locations in a country. In contrast, place-blind policies employ a one-size-fits-all approach that excludes people in vulnerable areas and aggravates inequalities in social service provision and social outcomes. By studying the Colombian case, this article demonstrates that a key placeblind feature of its healthcare model disproportionately affects small localities.

In many countries around the world, living in one subnational unit versus another can be just as important as race or class as a determinant of differential access to opportunities and wellbeing. Despite this fact, scholars still heavily emphasize interpersonal income inequality. This article develops and implements new tools to shift from interpersonal to subnational inequality and from economic to social inequality. It develops a novel concept and measurement of subnational social inequality that overcomes the inconsistencies between definitions and measurements found in existing research on the subject. Focusing on Latin America, the article applies the new measurement tools to reveal differences in the evolution and rankings of interpersonal and subnational forms of inequality. Such findings challenge our existing knowledge of both the levels and the sources of inequality in the region. To make sense of these discoveries, the article suggests that the usual drivers of interpersonal inequality-such as neoliberal reforms and authoritarianism-might drive down subnational inequality, while well-known inequality fighters-such as democratization and left party rulemight not be as effective at combating its subnational variety.

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La investigación subnacional en América Latina ha establecido que en los países de la región las condiciones de vida están fuertemente determinadas por el lugar de residencia. Pero a pesar de estos avances, sabemos muy poco sobre cómo lo subnacional interactúa con otros atributos como género, raza y ruralidad para producir un paisaje diverso de desventajas y privilegios. Este artículo utiliza el enfoque de la interseccionalidad para mostrar las enormes diferencias en analfabetismo e inasistencia a escuela entre grupos compuestos por distintas combinaciones de dichos atributos en Perú, Colombia y Chile. Para entender mejor el efecto de la dimensión subnacional en esas diferencias, el artículo aplica la descomposición Oaxaca-Blinder e identifica qué porción de las brechas regionales se debe a distintas composiciones demográficas entre las regiones. Los anteriores análisis motivan una reflexión teórica sobre la naturaleza de la desigualdad subnacional que se basa en distinguir un componente composicional y otro interseccional e identificar posibles causales de ambos.