Welfare Economics

By Daniela Romero*

Since the 1990s, the gender approach has been included in the debate of international conferences and in government policies and programs around the globe. In addition, this has led to the emergence of many women’s organizations that promote use of the concepts of the approach from both an activist and scientific perspective. Despite this, gender conditions and relations that vulnerate the lives of many women are still present in a diversity of contexts, particularly rural ones, where conditions of inequality and poverty persist. In this sphere, beyond rhetoric, social projects have not been able to deal with and/or go sufficiently deeper in the structural aspects that perpetuate such conditions. It is thus necessary for the new interventions to incorporate the gender approach in a more active way, fostering the transformation of gender relations from within the family, starting with the men and women themselves, identifying their individual and collective skills, interests and aspirations (Rodríguez, 2015). Read More »

By: Beatriz Muriel H., Ph.D*

As of December 2019, the world faced a health crisis as a result of COVID-19, which led to an economic crisis at the world level in 2020. In Bolivia, production (gross domestic product) fell by 8.8% in the mentioned year, as a result of a series of quarantine measures, both within and outside the country. However, beginning in 2021, with vaccination against COVID-19 and “herd immunity”, there was a reduction in movement restrictions and countries began to recover. Read More »

By: Lykke E. Andersen* and Alejandra Gonzales**

Thanks to the diligent work of the “Programa Nacional ITS/VIH/SIDA y Hepatitis Virales” in Bolivia, we able to present a good overview of the HIV situation in Bolivia. HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) is a virus, which can lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The bad news is that it has been on the rise in Bolivia for the last two decades, but the good news is that it is still at a low level by international standards, and it is concentrated in just a handful of municipalities.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

While the World’s education systems currently favour girls and women across most of the World (1), with 112 women enrolled in university for every 100 men worldwide (2), this educational advantage has yet to translate itself into more lucrative and prestigious positions for women. This is particularly so in the economics profession.

Only one woman has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (Elinor Ostrom in 2009), whereas in Physics there are 2 female Nobel Prize winners, in Chemistry 4, in Medicine 12, in Literature 14, and 16 women have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (3).

That women have trouble rising to the top in the economics profession is also reflected by the fact that there are currently only eight countries in the World in which the highest ranked economist is a woman (4). In at least three of those cases, however, the female researcher does not actually live in the country, but is rather affiliated with an institution in the country, while currently living in another country (5). Thus, only five countries in the world has a top economist, who is both female and actually lives in the country: Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uganda. In contrast, there are 120 countries in which the top ranked economist is male (see Map 1). For the remainder of the countries, no data was available, as no economists at all had registered at RePEc.

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By: Beatriz Muriel H., Ph.D*

The NINIS phenomenon (that is, young people who neither study nor work) is gaining relevance in the academic debate. However, the meaning behind this word is still a black box with many theories about its content. At one extreme, NINIS are imagined as lazy young people who spend their time playing video games, watching television or doing other unproductive activities. At the other extreme, NINIS are perceived as young people without opportunities for getting education or having a job. Therefore, they are in a kind of social exclusion.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

A phobia is an irrational fear of something. We all suffer from phobias of some kind. My worst phobia is arachnophobia, which is one of the reasons I love living in the (almost) safe haven of La Paz. Instead of trying to confront and overcome my irrational fear, I chose to run away. If I hadn’t found La Paz, I would probably be working as a scientist in Antarctica (which still sounds like a very attractive option to me).

So, although some of my friends consider me excessively rational, I can understand and empathise with people who suffer from irrational fears. Our brains are far from being rational, and are still dominated by emotions that were useful during our evolution over the last several hundred thousand years.

One of those emotions that were useful in our evolutionary past is xenophobia: a deep-rooted fear of foreigners. For most of our evolutionary history, it is quite likely that strangers were very bad news indeed, so this instinct made a lot of sense.

The xenophobia instinct is still very much with us, but it makes little sense anymore in this globalized, integrated, and relatively civilized world. Most foreigners you might meet probably want to work for you, trade with you, or help you in some other ways. Less than one in a million is out to kill you. Your benefit from interacting with foreigners outweigh the risks many thousand times. So it is indeed an irrational fear now.

Anna Rosling (photographer; co-founder of Gapminder; one of Bill Gates’ Heroes in the Field; and daughter-in-law of my biggest hero ever) has made a really nice attempt to alleviate our irrational fear of foreigners, in a safe and comfortable way, with her Dollar Street project. The project visited 264 families in 50 countries and collected 30,000 photos in order to show us normal life for normal families in many different dimension of ordinary life. This, of course, is in sharp contrast to the regular news we receive, which always show us the extremes, and thus give us a completely distorted image of the world. Her point is that people from other countries and cultures are not nearly as strange as they seem to us in the news.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

Despite my initial hesitations about going ahead with the 8^th Bolivian Conference on Development Economics much too late and without any confirmed sponsors, I have to admit that the 8th BCDE conference, carried out at UPB-Cochabamba this week, was once again a big success, and that I have thoroughly enjoyed two intensive days of frontier development research and networking in Cochabamba.

One of the main benefits of organizing the BCDE conference is the chance to invite and meet amazing people. This year, I was particularly delighted to meet Sara Farley of the Global Knowledge Initiative. Her keynote speech was about Collaborative Innovation, and while that was very inspiring in itself, it was even more interesting to hear, over dinner, how she applies that concept to everything in her own life (even her recent hiking & camping wedding on a mountain top in the US). I would love to try to apply some of her methods and strategies to the complex development problems of Bolivia.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

According to official statistics from the National Statistical Institute, the number of people injured in traffic accidents in Bolivia has more than tripled between 2000 and 2013 (the latest year for which data is available). Figure 1 shows the number of non-fatal traffic injuries rising from 5,356 in 2000 to 17,204 in 2013. To that we should add the number of traffic fatalities which increased from 681 deaths in 2000 to 1,848 deaths in the year 2013. Three of every four injuries in 2013 took place in the departments of La Paz, Santa Cruz and Cochabamba.

Figure 1: Non-fatal traffic injuries in Bolivia, 2000-2013, by Department

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

For more than a year now (since 20 July 2016), the road between Santa Barbara and Caranavi (on the primary road between La Paz and Rurrenabaque) has been closed from 7 am to 5 pm, Monday to Saturday, due to road construction activities. We didn’t know that, though, when we left La Paz at 5 am last Tuesday morning in order to drive to Rurrenabaque. When leaving La Paz, well before dawn, we paid the road toll of Bs. 9.50, and the guy in the toll booth didn’t think to warn us that we would soon have to wait for 9.5 hours because the road is closed all day.

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By: Lykke E. Andersen*

According to Nina and Arduz (2016), the density of roads in Bolivia is about 8 km per 100 km² of territory, which is less than half the average density in Latin America and less than a third of the world average of 28 km/100 km². By 2012, about 52% of the primary road network was paved, while a very small fraction of other roads was paved. The lack of good roads constitutes a serious limitation on the development of the country, as it dramatically increases transportation time and vehicle maintenance costs, and therefore transport costs (1).

This situation is pretty much inevitable for a large, sparsely populated, mountainous, jungle covered country, like Bolivia, but the Government of Bolivia has been doing its best to improve the situation by channelling enormous amounts of money into road construction (around USD 10 billion during the last 10 years), making the transport sector by far the single biggest recipient of public funds. For example, last year the Bolivian Government budgeted 28.9% of all public investment to the transport sector (28.9% of USD 6.4 billion amounts to USD 1.8 billion), while the education and health sectors received 5.5% each, and the water infrastructure sector only 0.9% (2).

The problem is that almost all of these road investments have been unbelievably badly executed.

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