The COVID-19 pandemic required universities to reorganize teaching and student services when campus access was restricted. This exploratory study examines whether reported university management practices were associated with enrollment change. University leaders in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela completed a survey between November 2021 and January 2022, rating eight management domains before and during the pandemic. Descriptive analyses included 105 institutional survey records. Enrollment analyses used 74 institutions in Colombia and Ecuador with usable student counts for 2019 and 2023. Separate regression models examined each pre-pandemic management domain, accounting for baseline institutional size, country, and perceived risks. Additional analyses examined relative enrollment change and compared institutions with different levels of reported management implementation during the pandemic. Enrollment increased by an average of 2935 students, although the median increase was considerably smaller, at 328 students. None of the eight management domains showed a statistically significant association with enrollment change after adjustment. Differences across implementation categories were also not statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. These findings did not establish a clear association between the measured management practices and enrollment change in this sample. Retrospective reporting and limited information on institutional circumstances constrain interpretation. The study contributes evidence on university management in a region where institutional data remain scarce. Prospective research should examine how specific practices relate to student retention, progression, and access to services, which would provide a more direct basis for assessing educational continuity during future disruptions.

The post-pandemic acceleration of digital tools has reshaped how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Latin America compete, yet the resulting maturity gains remain poorly understood in individual emerging-market economies. Ecuador exemplifies this gap: SMEs account for over ninety per cent of the formal business register but appear in few econometric studies, most based on convenience samples. This study asks how strongly digital adoption is associated with the digital maturity of Ecuadorian SMEs and which tools best predict e-commerce engagement. The analysis draws on the National Digital Skills Survey (ENHD, Encuesta Nacional de Habilidades Digitales), administered by Ecuador’s Ministry of Telecommunications (MINTEL), covering 847 SMEs in 2021. A ten-indicator Digital Adoption Index (DAI) is related to the ENHD maturity score through least squares regression with robust standard errors, and a binary logit model with multicollinearity diagnostics identifies the tools that predict e-commerce adoption. The DAI explains over half of the variance in digital maturity, robust to firm-size and sector controls. Website presence exerts the largest marginal effect on e-commerce adoption, followed by cloud services. Top adopters score twice as high as non-adopters, consistent with cumulative advantage. Policy implications include subsidised digital-foundations bundles for laggard micro-enterprises.

Background: Ecuador enacted the 2015 Organic Law for Labor Justice and Recognition of Domestic Work to strengthen employment stability and worker protection. Among its provisions, the reform established safeguards against pregnancy- and maternity-related dismissal and extended pension protection to people performing unpaid household work. This study examines whether the female employment-to-population ratio followed a different trajectory after the reform. Methods: The Synthetic Control Method was applied to annual country-level data from 1991 to 2023. Ecuador was compared with a weighted combination of eight Latin American and Caribbean countries that approximated its pre-reform employment trajectory. Placebo-in-time and placebo-in-space tests, post-treatment-to-pre-treatment mean squared prediction error (MSPE) ratios, an expanded-donor-pool analysis, and leave-one-out analyses were used to assess the stability of the comparison. Results: Female employment in Ecuador fell below the synthetic counterfactual after 2015, with a gap of approximately −3.0 percentage points in 2015 and a most negative annual gap of approximately −10.9 percentage points. Ecuador had the largest post/pre MSPE ratio, approximately 26, across Ecuador and the eight donor-placebo assignments. The corresponding placebo-based rank p-value was 1/9 = 0.111, the smallest attainable value with eight donor placebos; it therefore did not reach the conventional 5% or 10% significance levels. Conclusions: The evidence shows a sustained post-2015 divergence beginning in the reform year, but it does not establish that the reform caused the decline. The oil price collapse and the 2015–2016 economic slowdown coincided with the onset of the divergence, while the COVID-19 pandemic may have affected the gap from 2020 onward. These overlapping shocks limit causal attribution. Hiring responses, informality, and unpaid care burdens are therefore discussed as plausible mechanisms rather than empirically tested explanations.

Agricultural commodity markets remain central to household survival across many developing economies, yet their volatility is rarely framed as an adolescent sexual and reproductive health problem. This mini review uses a structured narrative approach anchored in a screened evidence map of 1065 records, from which 50 papers were retained and 16 studies were prioritized for full synthesis. We define adolescent reproductive health holistically, including sexual agency, contraceptive information and use, pregnancy intention, antenatal and obstetric care, protection from coercion, and maternal and neonatal outcomes. The review provides a concrete answer to the primary question: agricultural commodity price volatility is a distal, context-conditioned determinant of adolescent reproductive health, not a uniform direct cause. Its effects operate mainly through food security, household income, labor allocation, school continuity, gendered bargaining power, and service access. Negative shocks more consistently erode nutrition, schooling, transport to care, and access to adolescent-friendly services, especially among rural girls in households with weak shock buffers. Positive shocks may increase births or union formation when income effects dominate, but they may also harm health when higher labor demand raises the opportunity cost of caregiving and service use. Direct adolescent-specific causal evidence remains limited; therefore, adjacent evidence on fertility, child health, schooling, and maternal or neonatal outcomes is interpreted through an explicit evidence hierarchy rather than treated as equivalent to direct adolescent evidence. Policy priorities include shock-responsive social protection, school retention, contraceptive supply continuity, adolescent-friendly care, and early warning systems that trigger health and education responses during commodity instability.