In terms of knowledge creation, the LAC Digital Unit participates in the composition of regional studies and country diagnostics to inform digital transformation.
The Unit also contributes to publications produced under the auspices of the World Bank Group’s Identification for Development (ID4D) Initiative and the Digital Development Partnership (DDP) Initiative.
This brief examines nine AI-driven innovations across teaching, learning, and administration in Latin America and the Caribbean, including adaptive tutoring, automated lesson planning, and at-risk student identification. The publication cautions that realizing AI’s potential in education requires addressing the digital divide, ethical governance, and limited evidence of effectiveness at scale.
This brief examines the transformative potential of AI in higher education across Latin America and the Caribbean, highlighting key applications in student support, faculty research, and institutional management, supported by evidence of meaningful improvements in learning outcomes and operational efficiency. It also addresses the challenges hindering broader AI adoption in the region, including infrastructure gaps and faculty upskilling, and offers strategic recommendations for its ethical integration.
This policy research working paper estimates Latin American labor market exposure to generative AI using harmonized household surveys, finding that urban, higher-educated, formal-sector, and higher-income workers face the greatest exposure, while the digital divide, particularly severe in poorer countries, blocks nearly half of jobs that could benefit from AI augmentation from realizing productivity gains.
This report analyzes the digital divide in Colombia’s Amazonas department and proposes solutions to improve digital connectivity.
This report analyzes the financial inclusion landscape of Haiti’s World Bank-financed ASPIRE cash transfer program beneficiaries, finding limited access to formal financial services but greater uptake of mobile money and informal savings groups, and recommending targeted measures to expand digital financial services adoption, including promoting e-wallet use cases, improving digital ID access, easing KYC requirements, and building a sustainable cash-in and cash-out agent network.
This book analyzes hundreds of scholarly works and thousands of cyber incidents across 190 countries over the past decade to examine the economic drivers and consequences of cyber threats in developing nations, offering evidence-based policy recommendations on strengthening critical sector resilience, building national cybersecurity industries, and addressing market failures to guide effective cybersecurity investment in vulnerable economies.
The Digital Economy for Latin America and the Caribbean assessments, supported by the Digital Development Partnership, analyze the state of the digital economy of countries and provide detailed analysis and policy recommendations to inform national reform agendas.
This report tracks global digital progress and the persistent digital divide, arguing that while digital technologies are transforming economies and lives, billions remain offline and unequal access risks deepening development gaps, making careful measurement of digitalization (across jobs, services, infrastructure, and AI) essential for guiding policymakers and the private sector in closing the divide, particularly in developing countries.
This report examines AI’s transformative potential for global development, arguing that while AI can accelerate economic growth and expand access to knowledge, low- and middle-income countries face significant barriers to adoption, making it essential to strengthen the “four Cs” (connectivity, compute, context, and competency), alongside sound data governance, regulatory reform, and local innovation ecosystems to ensure AI’s benefits are inclusive, responsible, and broadly shared.
This paper finds that digitalization drives productivity growth, improves market access for rural households, small firms, and unbanked populations, and enhances government efficiency in developing economies. The publication cautions that AI and smart automation may yield smaller productivity gains than previous ICT waves and could heighten within-country inequality by requiring complementary skills.
This report analyzes transactional data and design characteristics from 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries’ fast payment systems to deliver evidence-based policy messages supporting the further development of fast payments in the region.
This policy research working paper measures learning losses from COVID-19 among Dominican Republic ninth-grade students between 2020 and 2022 using adaptive learning software data, finding no evidence of losses but documenting concerningly low mastery levels, with students grasping only 45 percent of grade-prerequisite math topics on average.
This policy research working paper analyzes over 1,500 Brazilian firms using the Firm-level Adoption of Technology survey and a difference-in-differences approach, finding that entering export markets positively drives firms’ adoption of advanced technologies in business administration, production planning, supply chain management, and quality control.
This policy research working paper investigates gender bias in AI-driven civic participation analysis using 2023 Latinobarómetro Survey data. It finds through machine learning that societal machismo norms, political interest, education, and left-wing alignment shape civic engagement, with gender bias persisting even after corrective measures and men in egalitarian societies requiring especially low machismo levels to participate.
This report surveys the global AI governance landscape, examining key challenges and regulatory approaches while arguing that effective governance frameworks, supported by reliable digital infrastructure, sound policies, and local talent investment, are essential to ensure AI is developed ethically and transparently across sectors while mitigating risks such as bias, privacy violations, and lack of accountability.
This report finds that Latin America and the Caribbean faces mutually reinforcing challenges of low growth, limited fiscal space, and citizen dissatisfaction amid adverse global conditions, while arguing that expanding digital connectivity, paired with investments in skills, regulatory frameworks, and financial markets, offers a critical opportunity to boost growth and reduce spatial, gender, and racial inequalities, provided that coverage gaps are closed and existing infrastructure is used more productively.
This report explores the perceptions and experiences of students, parents, teachers, and other education stakeholders involved in Prográmate, a project that uses a digital personalized learning platform to develop secondary school students’ math skills and knowledge in the Dominican Republic.
This report assesses Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state Value Added Tax cashback program, Devolve ICMS, using the World Bank’s G2Px framework to draw lessons on digital tools, equity, compliance, and service delivery for national and global Value Added Tax reform efforts.
This report distills operational lessons from Argentina’s pilot of AI-enabled digital employment services tools, serving as a practical handbook for policymakers on designing and scaling such tools to better support local employment offices and disadvantaged jobseekers.
This policy research working paper examines how technological change affects Central American and Dominican Republic workers that migrate to the United States, finding that these migrants have increasingly filled lower-skilled manual roles that leave them more vulnerable to AI and robotics disruption.
This report produced by World Bank Group (WBG) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) aims to help improve digital public infrastructure to drive stronger results for people living in LAC.
