An Italian firm has begun refurbishing three hospitals in Jamaica as part of a long-term effort to improve the provision of medical services in that country through a broad reform of the health sector. The firm, Rizanni de Eccher, is constructing new buildings to house hospital departments and improving existing support services and infrastructure, such as laboratories, sewage treatment, electrical power and roadways in Kingston Public Hospital, St. Ann's Bay Hospital and Mandeville Hospital. Renovations of two other hospitals are also being carried out as part of the IDB-financed program
While economists and politicians argue over how best to reduce unemployment, people like Mónica Lomé and Carlos Alberto Ramoda of Buenos Aires, Argentina, are helping to solve what remains one of Latin America's most daunting problems. The two met while employed at a private health insurance company in the 1980s. "I was his secretary for 10 years, and that's how we came to know each other," Lomé recalls with a smile. "Eventually we got married." In 1995, in a wave of corporate downsizing that followed the introduction of market-oriented reforms, Mónica and Carlos Alberto were laid off. Like
What happens when you give fiscal power to the people? In 1994 and 1995 Bolivia's national legislature decided to find out. It passed two laws that esentially transferred responsibility for setting budget priorities, deciding on infrastructure investments and monitoring public expenditures from the central government to lower units of government, including the country's 311 municipalities. The effect of the laws was striking and, in the opinion of many local observers, irreversible. After decades of near total dependence on federal handouts and marginal authority over local decisions
The IDB, along with the Organization of American States and the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America, has taken a central role in preparatory work leading to the launching of negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) at the presidential summit in Santiago, Chile, next April. The IDB has provided technical assistance to several of the working groups created in ministerial conferences held in Denver, Colorado, and Cartagena, Colombia, in 1995 and 1996, respectively. The conferences brought together ministers of commerce from 34 Western Hemisphere nations. The Free Trade
The Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL) will offer a prize of $10,000 to the winner of an essay contest on the relationship between labor standards and international trade. The contest is open to professionals and academics in all the IDB's 46 member countries. Essays, which should be no more than 30 pages, should be submitted on a floppy disk accompanied by two printed copies, signed with a pseudonym, in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese. The deadline for submissions is January 20, 1998. Based in Buenos Aires, INTAL is part of the IDB's Integration
Beneath the overheated publicity surrounding the Internet and all things digital lies a cold economic fact. Information infrastructure--the fusion of telecommunications networks, computers and information--is quickly becoming a ruthless discriminator in the international struggle for competitiveness. Traditional types of infrastructure--roads, telephone lines, electricity grids and airports--still form the bedrock of a nation's productive capacity. But among the industrialized nations where that physical infrastructure is already well developed, dominance of information technology increasingly
When Latin America's population was smaller, when few of its cities numbered more than a million people, and when its industries were in their infancy, conflicts over water were relatively infrequent. There was generally plenty to go around. When more water was needed, be it for agriculture, energy, residential or other uses, the solution was fairly simple: build more infrastructure to increase supplies.But Latin America has changed. Its rapidly growing population, burgeoning cities, fast-paced industrialization, and advances in agricultural technology are now straining water resources. The
While virtually all Latin American and Caribbean governments have expressed qualified approval for the creation of a hemispheric free-trade zone, debate rages as to the near-term benefits that such an arrangement woutld have for individual countries. In some countries, politicians argue that regional trade blocks like Mercosur or even a series of good bilateral agreements might be preferable to a hemispheric pact, at least in the short term. But most economists agree that the status quo--several regional trade zones crisscrossed by dozens of unique bilateral agreements--falls far short of what
LOANS ARGENTINA. . . $38 million to support a program that expands access to essential social services among female heads of household, indigenous communities, youth at risk, the elderly, and the disabled. The initiative, to be carried out by the Secretaría de Desarrollo Social, will seek to institutionalize a participatory planning process that encourages groups and individuals to develop and carry out their own social service projects at the community and neighborhood level. Funds will also be used to support the development of a Universal Family Identification and Registration System
Three years ago, Honduras' Francisco Morazán hydroelectric project, the country's main source of electricity, was on the verge of collapsing into a $775 million pile of rubble. "Water was leaking everywhere," recalls the Inter-American Development Bank's William Large, who was sent to Honduras on an emergency mission to see how the IDB could help save the project it had originally financed. "Without a doubt, it looked like the power house would flood." Some of the world's leading specialists had spent two years trying to contain the leaks without success. No one imagined engineering history