The Quality of Life in Latin American Cities: Markets and Perception

Date
Jan 2010
EDITOR
Powell, Andrew;Sanguinetti, Pablo;Lora, Eduardo;van Praag, Bernard M.S.
A growing number of cities around the world have established systems for monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective information with subjective opinions and cover a wide variety of topics. This book assesses a method that takes advantage of both types of information and offers criteria to identify and rank the issues of potential importance for urban dwellers. This method--which combines the so-called 'hedonic price' and 'life satisfaction' approaches to value public goods--was tested in pilot studies in six Latin American cities: Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, Medellín, Montevideo, and San José of Costa Rica. This publication belongs to the Latin American Development Forum Series (LADF), sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the World Bank.