Investments in education across countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have transformed the lives of millions of girls and the prospects of their families and societies. Unleashing the full economic potential of women is nevertheless still a curtailed issue in the region: just about half of women are unable to participate in paid work. The majority of the population out of the labor market is women between the ages of 24 and 45. This is the largest share of the available pool of unused human capital countries have, and where mothers of young children are concentrated. This book argues that more and better childcare constitutes a fundamental policy option to improve female outcomes in the labor market, but countries need to pay particular attention to the design and features of such services. First-rate educational programs will be useless if children are not enrolled or do not attend formal education centers. A large program expansion will be wasted if parents cannot enroll their children because they are unable to reach the center, don’t trust its quality, if the program is too expensive, or if work and care schedules are not compatible. Through an integrated framework applied to each country and an overview of the existing evidence, this book addresses the why and what questions about policy relevant instruments to achieve female labor participation. Parts I and II of the book lay out the motivation for Latin-American and Caribbean countries to act depicting their current situation both in terms of women’s labor participation and the use and provision of childcare services. Moreover, this book tackles the how question contributing to the incipient evidence about factors affecting the take-up of programs and demand for childcare services and other informal care arrangements. Part III of the book explores how to improve services and implement more and better formal, center-based care arrangements for young children. It looks at international benchmarks, discusses different experiences and proposes specific actions to solve potential inequalities in access to childcare.

For review see: Frank R. Safford, in HAHR : The Hispanic American Historical Review, 76, 2 (May 1996); p. 358-359.

Contains scholarly evaluations of books and book chapters as well as conference papers and articles published worldwide in the field of Latin American studies. Covers social sciences and the humanities in alternate years.

In Empire's Crossroads, Carrie Gibson offers readers a vivid, authoritative and action-packed history of the Caribbean. For Gibson, everything was created in the West Indies: the Europe of today, its financial foundations built with sugar money: the factories and mills built as a result of the work of slaves thousands of miles away; the idea of true equality as espoused in Saint Domingue in the 1790s; the slow progress to independence; and even globalization and migration, with the ships passing to and fro taking people and goods in all possible directions, hundreds of years before the term 'globalization' was coined. From Cuba to Haiti, from Dominica to Martinique, from Jamaica to Trinidad, the story of the Caribbean is not simply the story of slaves and masters - but of fortune-seekers and pirates, scientists and servants, travellers and tourists. It is not only a story of imperial expansion - European and American - but of global connections, and also of life as it is lived in the islands, both in the past and today.