The Tribune

AS part of an ongoing collaboration, the Inter-American Development Bank Group (IDB Group) and the University of The Bahamas (UB) hosted the launch of ‘Development in the Americas’ on Thursday at UB’s Harry C Moore Library Auditorium.

The one-day ‘knowledge seminar’, moderated by Dr Chris Curry featured presentations on two of the IDB’s flagship publications being introduced to Caribbean regional audiences: (1) ‘The Early Years: The Child Well-being and the Role of Public Policies’ and (2) ‘Social Pulse in Latin America and the Caribbean’. Regional public ministries and private institutions were invited to provide policy perspectives on recent regional and local industry and regulatory developments in sectors related to education, social services, labour and health.

‘Social Pulse in Latin America and the Caribbean’, drawing from household survey data in four Caribbean countries and eighteen Latin American countries, compares living conditions across the region and is the first institutional study on social conditions to solidly cover the Caribbean.

This advance represents tremendous efforts in terms of data collection and sharing by specific countries as well as technical assistance by the IDB.

The research shows: 1) Bahamian women play a key role in the labour market. Of the 22 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean studied – women in The Bahamas have the highest female labour force participation rates.

In The Bahamas 80 per cent of all women ages 25-64 are active in the labour market compared with 60 per cent of women in the Southern Cone and Andean countries and slightly over 40 per cent of women in Central America. Bahamian women have the second highest contributions to family labour income in the region.

2) Adolescent fertility for women 15-19 is lowest in the Bahamas among the 22 countries studied, nonetheless still higher than in the UK, the US and the region of East Asia and Pacific.

3) Forty-three per cent of the elderly population over 64 in the Bahamas lives alone or with their spouse, reflecting the more advanced stage of the demographic transition in The Bahamas and representing the trend seen in household composition for the elderly throughout the region. Over the period 2002 to 2014 the percentage of the elderly living alone or with their spouse increased by nine percentage points.

4) The unemployment rates for youth ages 15-24 are the highest in the Caribbean countries in the study, with the top three of 22 countries being Jamaica, Barbados and the Bahamas.

5) Although the report represents a tremendous advance in the ability to benchmark and compare social conditions in the Caribbean, some key indicators are not available for The Bahamas and other Caribbean countries. This is because the data available – labour force surveys - do not collect information on living conditions for children younger than 15 or for outcomes such as education and health for adults.

6) The IDB and the University of The Bahamas are exploring ways for students and researchers to use the data available in the report towards evidence-based social policy as well as exploring new avenues for data collection.