Many Latin American countries have experienced improvements in income over recent decades, with several of them now classified as high-income or upper middle-income in terms of conventional metrics. But has this change been mirrored in improvements across the different areas of people’s lives? How’s Life in Latin America? Measuring Well-being for Policy Making addresses this question by presenting comparative evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) with a focus on 11 LAC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay).
This book provides an overview of factors fostering well-being in Latin America and discusses many threats to well-being in the region. The book assesses the current well-being situation in Latin American countries and offers an explanation based on its many drivers, such as family arrangements, kindness and affection of interpersonal relations, economic situation, education regimes, political institutions, poverty, income inequality, crime and violence, and the weakness of political institutions. The book provides a framework to fully understand the drivers behind high well-being, including the challenges and opportunities that public policy faces in the procurement of people’s well-being. The book provides relevant material for policymakers and social scientist interested in the procurement of well-being.
This book critically analyses the influence of international policies and guidelines on the performance of interventions aimed at reducing health inequities in Latin America, with special emphasis on health promotion and health in all policies strategies. While the implementation of these interventions plays a key role in strengthening these countries’ capacity to respond to current and future challenges, the urgency and pressures of cooperation and funding agencies to show results consistent with their own agendas not only hampers this goal, but also makes the territory invisible, hiding the real problems faced by most Latin American countries, diminishing the richness of local knowledge production, and hindering the development of relevant proposals that consider the territory’s conditions and cultural identity. Departing from this general analysis, the authors search for answers to the following questions: Why, despite the importance of the theoretical advances r egarding actions to address social and health inequities, haven’t Latin American countries been able to produce the expected results? Why do successful initiatives only take place within the framework of pilot projects? Why does the ideology of health promotion and health in all policies mainly permeate structures of the health sector, but not other sectors? Why are intersectoral actions conjunctural initiatives, which often fail to evolve into permanent practices? Based on an extensive literature review, case studies, personal experiences, and interviews with key informants in the region, Globalization and Health Inequities in Latin America presents a strategy that uses monitoring and evaluation practices for enhancing the capacity of Latin American and other low and middle-income countries to implement sustainable processes to foster inclusiveness, equity, social justice and human rights. p/pp
Africa is not merely an invention with a modern, imperial or colonial background. Nor is it simply a continent in need of foreign aid from the richer, more affluent societies. Africa might be economically needy, politically unstable, and, in part, socially chaotic and suffering from civil wars and social unrest. However, the continent and its peoples are certainly different from the negative image portrayed in the mass media. Africa had been the cradle of civilization in the pre-colonial era, and is today undergoing a diverse cultural, philosophical, and spiritual development with great potential, contributing to contemporary debates around the ethics of globality. The novelty of this book derives from its multidisciplinary approach. Although the authors generally come from the fields of development and economics, global studies, political science, philosophy and ethics, and sociology, they present Africa’s alternative view of human wellbeing in order to provide theories and policy recommendations which inspire the specific developmental patterns for the growth of the continent. The volume discusses the meaning of development for the continent by drawing on culture, identity, ethnicity, and philosophy of nature. The contributors examine a variety of issues and themes directly related to the opportunities provided by globality to promote the development of the continent. They also discuss solutions for underdevelopment and poverty, and how those perspectives might be effectively integrated into the global agenda for the development of Africa.
This book discusses child well-being, with children and adolescents as key informants, from a Latin American perspective. It explores theoretical and empirical issues related to well-being and associated aspects, in order to understand the well-being of this population. Topics analyzed in this volume address for instance environment and community, rights, leisure time, technologies, interpersonal relationships and spirituality and their implications for changes in the well-being in children and adolescents. Especially relevant for scholars and professionals in the social and health sciences, as well as policy makers, seeking to promote child well-being, regardless of the area in which they operate.
The "quality of life" concept of quality of life is a broad one. It incorporates basic needs but also extends beyond them to include capabilities, the "livability" of the environment, and life appreciation and happiness. Latin America's diversity in culture and levels of development provide a laboratory for studying how quality of life varies with a number of objective and subjective measures. These measures range from income levels to job insecurity and satisfaction, to schooling attainment and satisfaction, to measured and self-assessed health, among others. Paradox and Perception greatly improves our understanding of the determinants of well-being in Latin America based on a broad "quality of life" concept that challenges some standard assumptions in economics, including those about the relationship between happiness and income. The authors' analysis builds upon a number of new approaches in economics, particularly those related to the study of happiness and finds a number of paradoxes as the region's respondents evaluate their well-being. These include the paradox of unhappy growth at the macroeconomic level, happy peasants and frustrated achievers at the microlevel, and surprisingly high levels of satisfaction with public services among the region's poorest. They also have important substantive links with several of the region's realities, such as high levels of income inequality, volatile macroeconomic performance, and low expectations of public institutions and faith in the capacity of the state to deliver. Identifying these perceptions, paradoxes, and their causes will contribute to the crafting of better public policies, as well as to our understanding of why "populist" politics still pervade in much of the region.
Using a political economy of health, Gender, Globalization, and Health in a Latin American Context demonstrates how the development of health systems in Latin America was closely linked to men's participation in formal labor. This established an inherent male bias that continues to shape health services today. While economic liberalization has created new jobs that have been taken up mainly by women, these jobs fail to offer the same health entitlements. Author Jasmine Gideon explores the resultant tensions and gender inequalities, which have been further exacerbated in the context of health care commercialization.
