Gender and institutional strengthening: the World Bank's policy record in Latin America

This article examines the gendered nature of institutional strengthening policies at the World Bank, as part of an attempt to analyse what role gender plays in the institutionalist turn within development policy. It focuses on three snapshots of Bank action wherein debates about gender and institutional strengthening are particularly pertinent: Washington, DC policy texts and Presidential speeches; gender policy enacted in the Latin American and Caribbean region; and an Argentine project loan on social capital promotion and family strengthening. Two themes emerge from these sites: (1) that couplehood between men and women has been identified as a key informal institution necessary for development; and (2) that gender reform has been positioned as an institutional change issue requiring attention to issues such as social marketing. New norms about gender interaction thus emerge as an explicit part of the Bank's reform agenda, and are shaping project experiences across Latin America.     

Feminists and Technocrats in the Democratization of Latin America: A Prolegomenon

Women's movements made important contributions to ending the period of authoritarian rule in Latin America, but their participation in the reconstruction of democratic politics has been more limited than expected. This paper argues that the enormous influence exerted by technocratic elites in the democratization process in Latin America has represented an obstacle to the improvement of women's status in the region. Gender-biased assumptions and practices have been only partially addressed, in part because the policy-making process is under the control of economists, a professional group with a particularly unfriendly stand towards gendered analysis. It is suggested that reforms within economics may help in the task of making democracy more responsive to the demands of women.     

Problems and contradictions of participatory democracy: lessons from Latin America

The participatory innovations of the last few decades, particularly in Latin America, seem to suggest that the establishment of more participatory democracies is possible. However, limitations have characterized important participatory experiences. While the Bolivian, Ecuadorian, and Venezuelan attempts to promote popular participation have produced both positive and negative effects, some of these participatory experiences’ limitations are useful to highlight more general problems and contradictions that seem to be inherently associated with the establishment of participatory democracy in poorly functioning liberal democracies and in exclusionary and unequal societies. This analysis suggests that, paradoxically, the establishment of effective and inclusive participatory institutions may be less feasible where participatory mechanisms appear, at first glance, as most needed and promising.     

Economic Growth and Convergence in Latin America

Little is known about the convergence process among developing countries in general and in Latin America in particular. For the period as a whole there is no evidence of a narrowing in the cross-country dispersion of income (sigma convergence). But there is evidence of convergence to different steady state income levels at a speed that is common to all countries (conditional beta convergence). The article also shows that the estimates of convergence are sensitive to the way in which GDP per capita is measured.     

Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-national Examination of Local Governments and Natural Resource Governance in Latin America

There has been increased emphasis in the last three decades on the decentralization of natural resource governance decisions to local government in developing countries as a means of improving environmental quality, public service delivery, and the accountability of local officials. We examine the performance of decentralization of natural resource management services in a large sample of municipal governments in four Latin American countries. Our analysis includes a variety of factors discussed in the literature as important in influencing the responsiveness of government officials to local needs. We provide a nested institutional model in which local officials respond to incentives created by the structure of formal political institutions at both the local and national level. The results provide support for the importance of considering local and national institutional arrangements as these co-determine the political incentives within decentralized systems.

New directions in welfare: rights-based social policies in post-neoliberal Latin America

What happens to the politics of welfare in the Global South when neoliberal values are questioned? How is welfare re-imagined and re-enacted when governments seek to introduce progressive change? Latin America provides an illustration and a valuable entry point to debates about ‘interruptions’ of neoliberalism and the changing nature of social policy. Drawing on examples of disability policies in Ecuador and care provision in Uruguay, we argue that there is a ‘rights turn’ in welfare provision under the left that reflects a recognition that previous welfare models left too many people out, ethically and politically, as well as efforts to embed welfare more centrally in new patterns of respect for socio-economic and identity-based human rights. Given Latin America’s recent contestation of neoliberal development as well as its history of sometimes dramatic welfare shifts, the emergence of rights-based social provision is significant not just for the region but also in relation to global struggles for more equitable governance.     

Life Satisfaction in Latin America: A Size-of-Place Analysis

In Latin America, countries can be divided into two groups: those where people in villages and small towns are happier than people in middle sized cities, and those where they are less happy. Four possible reasons for these patterns are explored: level of economic development, social values, public social spending, and presence of indigenous population. In regressions on happiness of each explanatory factor separately, development and public social spending (especially on health, housing, and social security) are the most important. In a joint regression, public social spending is found to be the main explanation of the different happiness patterns.     

Financial investment via ADRs in Mexico and South America

American depository receipts (ADRs) are dollar-denominated, negotiable instruments issued by a depository bank to represent ownership of a foreign security in the bank's possession. They are the primary method employed by Latin American corporations to raise equity capital in the United States. One flequently overlooked aspect about ADRs is that their investment performance provides a gauge not only on management's performance but also a measure of the foreign government's ability to provide a political, legal, economic and social climate that is conducive to international investment. This paper investigates the returns and risks associated with foreign investment in Mexico and South America. First, we show that the weekly returns to Latin American stocks are weakly correlated with the U.S. stock market which suggests that they can reduce the risk of a portfolio that is fully diversified within the U.S. market. Second, we find that ADRs from this region are more risky than U.S. common stocks. However, we find little evidence that foreign exchange rate risk should be a major factor in the investment decision. Third, we examine the effects of the devaluation of the Mexican peso and show that political factors can significantly increase the risk and reduce the return to foreign investment. Finally, the results show that investors do not pay a significantly larger relative transaction cost premium for investing in Mexican and South American equity vis-à-vis U.S. common stock. We conclude that ADRs provide the ability for the U.S. investor to realize potentially superior gains from companies located in these emerging economies. However, the willingness by the U.S. investor to disinvest means that politicians and managers have a powerful incentive to continue reforms that lead to improved standards of living for their citizens and employees.     

Institutions and Economic Performance: The Use and Abuse of Culture in New Institutional Economics

Important research programs within New Institutional Economics advance culturalist arguments to explain failures of economic development. Focusing on the work of Douglass C. North and Avner Greif, this article argues that such arguments rely on an essentialist conception of culture that is both historically inaccurate and analytically misleading. Greif’s work in particular rests on a selective use of empirical data that ultimately distorts the deductive models that are at the core of his work. As a result, both scholars use culture to account for outcomes that are more adequately explained as the product of social conflict and political struggles—struggles in which culture plays a far more contingent and destabilizing role than the one they attribute to it. What is needed, I argue, is to link arguments about the persistence of inefficient institutions with a sociologically informed conception of culture as an ensemble of resources that enhance rather than constrain the scope of individual agency. To come to terms with the effects of culture on institutional formation and change it is necessary to replace the essentialism articulated by North and Greif with a strategic-instrumentalist view in which culture is compatible with a wide spectrum of economic behaviors, individual actions, and thus institutional trajectories.

Fostering the post-development debate: the Latin American concept of tecnologia social

This essay revisits the historical development of a concept – tecnologia social – as one avenue for discussing alternatives to post-development, arguing that the Western-based historical path of technology development is one of the main sources of growing human impoverishment, social inequalities and economic dependency. The concept of tecnologia social points towards political processes that create opportunities to redefine the arrangements among social groups, artefacts and methods used in everyday life, particularly for production and consumption. Because the post-development debate has been criticised for formulating a sound and strong critique to mainstream development but failing to propose concrete empirical alternatives, we seek to foster the debate through the Latin American concept of tecnologia social.     

当代拉美激进左翼政治的形成和发展

从20世纪90年代起,拉美国家实行的西方传统政治体制和新自由主义经济模式逐渐暴露出固有的弊端,部分国家政治、经济和社会矛盾急剧上升。以委内瑞拉、玻利维亚和厄瓜多尔为代表的的激进左翼政治力量异军突起,成功依靠广大中下层民众的支持通过民主选举上台执政。激进左翼政权通过实施扩大民主参与、变革政治经济体制和改善社会民生等有力举措,在曲折中逐渐站稳脚跟。这一时期的拉美激进左翼的政治形成和发展过程值得我们深入关注。     

拉美共运的发展轨迹--评介《拉丁美洲的共产主义运动》

由中国社会科学院拉丁美洲研究所祝文驰、毛相麟和中共中央对外联络部李克明撰写、中国人民大学高放作序、当代世界出版社出版的《拉丁美洲的共产主义运动》一书,是作者承担的国家社会科学基金重点研究项目的最终成果,也是作者     

A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Korean and Japanese Clientelism

Clientele networks are differently structured across nations, depending on the political institutional setup and the configuration of political and social forces. The political institutional setup, which is cross-nationally different, determines where clientele networks are formed, how extensive they are and how long they can persist. The configuration of political and social forces, which varies over time, defines who takes the lead in clientele networks and how effective they are for producing policy effects. A comparison of Korean and Japanese clientelism suggests that the Korean case represents a form of national-level, defensive, non-cumulative and high political-risk clientelism, while the Japanese case illustrates a form of local-level, cumulative and low political-risk clientelism. Korean clientelism is not a copy of the Japanese variant. Based on this analysis, the author suggests that not every social organisation is functional for democratic governance. He also points out that the gradual process of disintegrating clientele networks is on the move.     

The Limits of Studies in Comparative Development of East Asia and Latin America: the case of land reform and agrarian policies

This paper critically examines the widespread belief that the early implementation of comprehensive land reforms prior to the industrialisation process, coupled with subsequent agrarian state policies channelling the intersectoral transfer of resources, has been a central determinant of East Asia's (mainly Taiwan's and South Korea's) outperformance of Latin America. We argue that, although those agrarian policies should certainly be part of any comparative investigation of the course of capitalist development in each of these two regions, they cannot explain their divergence. The paper contends that the respective scope and timing of agrarian policies has been an expression of the specific contradictions of the early industrialisation process in each region, rather than an autonomous determinant of the course of the latter. Based on insights derived from the Marxian critique of political economy, the paper shows that each region's respective agrarian policies have expressed the differential resolution of the opposition between the rate of profit (industrial capital) and ground-rent (landed property) in the import substituting industrialisation process. In so doing, the paper takes issue with the claim that timely land reforms in Taiwan and Korea have facilitated the subsequent successful turn to an export-oriented industrialisation strategy. An alternative account of the different developmental paths in East Asia and Latin America based on the unfolding of the Marxian ‘law of value’ on a world scale is also provided.     

Democracy and Development in a Globalized World: Thinking About Latin America from Within

The choice among paths that countries should follow has been a staple of political debates in Latin America and, over the past 40 years, Fernando Cardoso has brought his analysis to bear on these debates. This article summarizes and then assesses Cardoso’s argument about the choice of paths faced by Latin American countries, the consequences for democracy and development of following different paths, and the political position that is supported by this analysis of choices and their consequences. Though Cardoso explicitly supports the path of globalized social democracy over an anti-globalization option in the current period, I suggest that the current state of knowledge does not offer unequivocal support for the argument that choosing to follow the path of globalized social democracy—or that of anti-globalization—is the best political option for all countries in Latin America. Different countries might very well be doing what is best for them, given their circumstances, by following different paths.     

Privatizing state owned enterprises in Latin America: A research agenda

This paper identifies major areas related to the privatization of state owned enterprises in Latin America that could very well be applied to other regions of the world, as more countries try to allow the private sector to play a larger role in their economies.