Latin American Economy & Business - October 2018

Governments across Latin America and the Caribbean spend a lot of money, but there is significant waste and inefficiency in the way they do it. According to a new (September 2018) report, Better Spending for Better Lives: How Latin America and the Caribbean Can Do More With Less, by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), inefficiencies and fraud in procurement, civil service, and targeted transfers could be as large as US$220bn a year or 4.4% of GDP – enough to eliminate extreme poverty in the region.