This paper analyzes the determinants of child health among ladino in rural Guatemala. The focus of the study is to examine child-age-specific impact of household characteristics on child health. The estimates of child health demand function using child-age-disaggregated sample indicate huge variations in the determinants of the different child age groups. This implies the following relationships between child health and household characteristics. First, household economic condition is positively correlated with the health status of children. Influence of household economic status on child health is stronger for older children. Further, the health of children in households with less-educated mothers benefits more from an improvement in the household economic condition. Second, only school education, but not education in adult literacy classes, enhances maternal ability to improve child health. Third, maternal education contributes to the improvements in the health of children aged 24-47 months, and not others.

Since its launch in 1997, Progresa-Oportunidades, a Mexican poverty alleviation program, has succeeded in reducing poverty in the country. However, previous studies on the program have shed little light on the program's unintended effects. The purpose of this study is to analyze one of such secondary effects, focusing on migration, which has been broadly seen in Mexico. The present paper makes use of 1997's, 2000's and 2003's household data to see two short-term effects (1997-2000, 2000-2003) and one medium-long-term effect (1997-2003). The result of the econometrical analysis indicates that Progresa-Oportunidades has increased migration from rural to urban area within Mexico.

This paper analyzes the influence of economic interests and family structure involved in the decision making of the Brazilian workers in Japan whether to become permanent residents or return home. Data for this study comes from a fieldwork research at the Brazilian consulates in Tokyo and Nagoya in 2008, which are analyzed using statistic regression models, such as OLS and Ordered Logistic regression.

The results show that, if the workers have a goal of “how much money to be earned in Japan”, its goal has positive relationship with their monthly saving ratio higher than other economic variables such as monthly income and remittance ratio, and when they are reaching its goal, they tend to declare a plan to stay in Japan.

In the context of neoliberal economic reforms, the flexibility in Brazilian labor market has improved since 1990s. Several types of flexibilization are mentioned in earlier studies, such as Chahad (2003), Krein (2001) and Cacciamali (2005). We analyze the effects of flexibilization in Brazilian labor market by estimating the Mincerian wage equation with some explanatory variables related to the structural changes in the labor market. We found the discontinuous effect of working hours on wages, and also positive correlations of both formal work and participation in labor union on workers' monthly wages in Brazil, using the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) made by Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Workers' remittances to home countries have been increasingly important resources for Central American countries. However, empirical studies focusing on the effects of workers' remittances on exchange rate regimes of Central American Region are not yet to be seen. Theoretically we can expect that the remittances play an important role as a stabilizer of the exchange rate regimes in terms of shock absorber and risk sharing. This paper empirically analyses the effects of workers' remittances on the exchange rate regimes in Central American Region, by improving the frameworks of previous studies. The result of the analyses shows that in comparison with other macroeconomic factors, the effect of remittances is significant in stabilizing the exchange rate regimes.