COVID-19: The Impact in Latin America

About the speakers:

Julio Croda is an associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul. He was chief of Department of Communicable Diseases at the Secretary of Health Surveillance of the Ministry of Health in Brazil from 2019 to 2020. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Croda received his MD from the Federal University of Bahia and his PhD from São Paulo University. 

Marcela Eslava is professor of economics at Universidad de Los Andes, in Bogotá; a chief co-editor for Economía, the journal of the Latin American and the Caribbean Economic Association LACEA; a research affiliate of LACEA and IPA’s SME program; and member of the directing boards of LACEA, RIDGE and the Latin American committee of the Econometric Society. She holds a PhD degree from University of Maryland at College Park. Her current research interests include the relationship between firm dynamics and regulations; the relationship between business growth and the evolution of productivity vs. demand at the firm; the effect of credit constraints on business performance and aggregate productivity; and the policy alternatives to address financial restrictions to businesses. Professor Eslava’s research has been published in leading academic journals.

Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Professor Lustig’s research is on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. Her most recent publication Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty, (Brookings 2018) is a step-by-step guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Prof. Lustig is a founding member and President Emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Prof. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance.  She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Alberto Diaz-Cayeros is a King Center faculty affiliate, senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University. His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America. He is author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016) and coauthor with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a project on the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico and is the co-PI (with Beatriz Magaloni) of the project Citizen Trust and Evidence-Based Police Accountability and Professionalization in Mexico.