Notwithstanding its many achievements, Costa Rica’s cities are not the emblems of sustainability, efficiency, and livability that one would expect. Stagnant poverty rates and rising inequalities…

Carina Lakovits, Diana Tello Medina |

Whenever the share of industry in the economy starts waning, industrial expansion often becomes a component of the growth policies. This blog analyzes if and how targeting labor market barriers…

Rishabh Sinha |

Why are fertilizer prices so high, and what can countries in Central America do about this?

Luis Flores, Viviana Perego, Diego Arias |

Costa Rica lost the momentum for poverty reduction towards the end of the twentieth century. This makes Costa Rica an outlier in a region that conti…

Jacobus de Hoop, Agustin Arakaki |

Public investment and urban planning are two strategies that guide countries' efforts toward sustainable development. However, if these strategies do not consider natural hazards, decades of…

Haris Sanahuja, Alonso Brenes, Pol Nadal Cros |

Central America and the Dominican Republic have a good track record of economic growth. Between 1991 and 2019, Central America grew by an average of 4.5% per year, and the Dominican Republic by an…

Michel Kerf |

The buzz around satellite imagery over the past few years has grown increasingly loud. Google Earth, drones, and microsatellites have grabbed headlines and slashed price tags. Urban planners are…

Sarah Elizabeth Antos, Nancy Lozano Gracia, Ana I. Aguilera |

In the previous blog, we discussed how remote sensing techniques could be used to map and inform policymaking in secondary cities, with a practical application in 10 Central American cities. In…

Sarah Elizabeth Antos, Nancy Lozano Gracia, Ana I. Aguilera |

We are all too familiar with these figures: on average, only 50% of the population in Latin America is connected to sewerage and 30% of those households receive any treatment. These figures are…

Diego Juan Rodriguez |

Last Saturday, tens of thousands of people gathered on the Washington D.C. mall for the March for Science alongside hundreds of sister marches around the world to coincide with Earth Day. Climate…

Amal-Lee Amin |