[Excerpt] The Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean of the U.S. Agency for International Development has produced the LAC Databook, Latin America and the Caribbean: Selected Economic and Social Data, annually since 1991 to provide member countries, development practitioners, and students of the region with a wide-ranging compendium of statistics on the region's social and economic progress. The 2008 edition continues the aim of the Bureau to disseminate high quality data on the region from numerous reliable sources, both public and private. Each chapter of the Databook is devoted to a single sector or aspect of development in which the reader will find data across countries and time.