The State of the HIV Epidemic in Latin America and the Caribbean: Policy Recommendations

The objective of this paper is to obtain estimates of the effect of HIV prevalence on economic performance in selected economies of Latin America using a panel regression to identify plausible interventions to fight the epidemic in the region and ameliorate the negative effect of this epidemic on human capital accumulation. Due to the suspicion that either all variables of interest are endogenous, or the explanatory variables are mainly lagged variables, this analysis requires the construction of an econometric device to model multivariate time series. Even though, the epidemic remains at relative low levels compared with other countries and seemingly has not caused harm to the economy, there are worrisome signs showing the potential risk of not taking the proper course of action to make sure that the HIV epidemic would not get out of control as has occurred in others part of the world.