Uneven Recovery in Latin America and the Caribbean: Was the Early Childhood Left Behind During the Pandemic?

From a policy perspective, interventions promoting early childhood development have proven to generate the highest returns to human capital accumulation. Investing in early childhood improves long-term educational and labor outcomes by stimulating children’s mental and physical abilities, and may also bring about positive externalities by facilitating the participation of other adult household members in the labor market. Thus, it becomes urgent to grasp the impact of the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns on the welfare of younger children. To this effect, this note uses the early childhood module included in the second wave of HFPS surveys, which covers children below school age for each country. According to this data, 27.4 percent of households had at least one child under the age of five by late 2021.