GeoDevelopment Observatory of Bolivia / Insights
Human capital constraints and the regions of Bolivia
Where malnutrition, language barriers, school dropout and unequal education cluster across 339 municipalities, and how they divide Bolivia into seven or eight regions.
This study maps five constraints on human capital across Bolivia’s 339 municipalities: chronic malnutrition in children, the share of the population that does not speak Spanish, the secondary-school dropout rates of boys and girls, and inequality in years of education. It summarises them with principal components, finds where high and low values cluster in space (hot spots and cold spots), and groups municipalities that are both similar and contiguous into regions. All five indicators are in the observatory’s SDG goal datasets (sdg02, sdg04 and sdg10).
Mendez, C., & Gonzales, E. (2021). Human capital constraints, spatial dependence, and regionalization in Bolivia: A spatial clustering approach. Economía, 44(87), 115–145. https://doi.org/10.18800/economia.202101.007