To mitigate these challenges, the evaluation team prolonged the consultation period and broadened the scope and depth of its secondary data review by including external reviews, assessments and evaluations and country progress reports, including decentralized evaluations, to cross-reference the data and validate findings. Finally, the evaluation team recruited three international consultants and a national research institute to review the draft ICPE report. Despite the challenges and delays, the evaluation was still able to guarantee respect for evaluation norms and professional standards.
1.3 Country context The Republic of Peru is a very diverse country, with three regions: the Coast, the Andes and the Amazon. The population of Peru was estimated at 33.3 million people in 2021, of whom 79.3 percent lived in urban areas, 25.8 percent defined themselves as indigenous and 3.6 percent as Afro-Peruvians.7 The Peruvian economy has undergone structural changes in the last decades, with economic expansion, increased public investment and a reduction in poverty and income inequality.8 However, between 2014 and 2017, economic growth slowed due to a decrease in the price of copper, Peru’s principal export commodity, as well as the impact of the ‘El Niño Costero’ phenomena9 and the Lava Jato corruption case.10 The economy is not well diversified, and strongly relies on natural resources, but in 2018, economic activity improved due to the recovery of domestic demand, private investment and consumption.11 Despite being an upper-middle income country,12 and ranking 79 out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index,13 Peru suffers from poverty and inequality. Between 2019 and 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the proportion of the population living in poverty rose from 20.2 percent to 30.1 percent.14 Inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, was 41.5.15 Peru’s restrictive measures to combat the pandemic, such as stay-at-home orders, curfews and border closures, led to an economic downturn in 2020. The economy started to recover in the first trimester of 2021, showing GDP growth of 3.8 percent compared to the previous year thanks to the recovery of domestic demand, increased consumption and economic reactivation measures to support families and businesses.16 The labour market was also hit by the pandemic, with unemployment increasing from 8.8 percent in the second trimester of 2020 to 12 percent in the same period of 2021. The informal employment sector, which stood at 68.4 percent of the total employed in 2020, could not comply with quarantine measures. The pandemic exposed a healthcare crisis in the country. Although Peru has made progress with the universality of Comprehensive Health Insurance, coverage is still not available to the entire population, with greater impact on vulnerable groups such as people living in remote areas, unemployed, refugees and migrants.17 By mid-2021, the Government of Peru had recorded 2,033,606 cases of COVID-19, and
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INEI. Nota de Prensa (N° 109 – 21 junio 2019). Inter-American Development Bank Group. Country Strategy with Peru (2017-2021). Relief Web et al (2017). Learning from El Niño Costero. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Peru%20PERC%20 171031%20EN%20online.pdf. Central Reserve Bank of Peru (2019) Annual Report 2018. OECD (2019) Multidimensional Review of Peru, Volume 2. From Analysis to Action. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/d9afdddden/index.html?itemId=/content/component/d9afdddd-en. World Bank data. https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=XT-PE. UNDP (2020) Human Development Report Peru. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes/PER.pdf. INEI (2021) Press release. https://www.inei.gob.pe/prensa/noticias/pobreza-monetaria-alcanzo-al-301-de-la-poblacion-del-paisdurante-el-ano-2020-12875. The World Bank (2018) Gini index Peru, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=PE. INEI, Behaviour of the Peruvian Economy in the First Quarter of 2021. https://www.inei.gob.pe/media/MenuRecursivo/boletines/02informe-tecnico-pbi-i-trim-2021.pdf. National Superintendence of Health (2020). Technical Report: Analysis and Identification of people not insured in health at the national level.
Chapter 1. BACKGROUND AND introduction
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