Growth and Chronic Poverty: Evidence from Rural Communities in Ethiopia

This article employs a computable general equilibrium model for Sandinista Nicaragua to argue that a foreign exchange constrained economy does not necessarily fall prey to the inflation‐devaluation‐inflation vicious cycle characteristic of more mature Keynesian economies. It is seen that when the economy is shocked by a devaluation, prices do not rise proportionately. Output increases and the distribution of income can actually improve. These results support Sandinista policy of raising wages along with devaluation, a policy widely criticised as counterproductive. When the model is structured to account for the combined effects of Sandinista policies, however, including rising government expenditure and multiple effective exchange rates, a host of macroeconomic problems experienced by the regime arise. Stagflation sets in, income distribution deteriorates and the incentives for export production seriously diminish.     

Service Innovation in Developing Economies: Evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper proposes a framework for understanding key aspects of service innovation in developing economies, based on four dimensions: first, the integration of services in national innovation systems; second, competences and preferences; third, networking and cooperation; and, fourth, outcomes in terms of socio-economic impacts. This conceptual framework is matched with new evidence from case studies performed in six different Latin America and the Caribbean countries (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Jamaica) and nine sectors (tourism, software-ICT, outsourcing, mining, logistics, retail, creative services, sport services and biotech services). The results reveal the importance of specificities in service innovation and suggest policy and managerial implications.     

Active Labour Market Programmes in Latin America and the Caribbean: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis

We present a systematic review and meta-analysis of impact evaluations of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). We extract 296 impact estimates from 51 programme evaluations to analyse the effects of participation on employment, earnings, hours worked, and formality. Our analysis finds that the probabilities of being employed and in formal employment are the labour market indicators most likely to be positively affected by ALMPs in LAC. Moreover, ALMPs are more successful among women and youth and when they are implemented during periods of economic expansion. Training programmes increase both formal employment and earnings; training is particularly effective when it is more intensive and when explicitly targeting poor individuals.     

Views from the periphery: Futures of neoliberalism in Latin America

The political economy of Latin American countries seems increasingly characterised by neoliberal approaches. Economic factors at the global and continental scale seem to reinforce this trend. This article explores the social bases of neoliberalism not only in terms of the technocratic but also of the wider social and political base. The connections between neoliberal reform, people and places are explored through examining the nature of exportorientated growth, the transformations of labour markets, the social impacts of reform, poverty and the changing social provision of the state. The contradictions within the neoliberal model are examined before the future of neoliberalism and the prospects for alternative development strategies and sociopolitical scenarios are considered. In particular, the arguments from neostructuralist contributions are assessed and some of the contrasts between neoliberal and neostructural theories identified.     

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.     

Civic engagement and uncontrolled ballot votes: Evidence from Swiss cities

Citizens are increasingly encouraged to get more directly involved in policy-making, especially at subnational levels of government. By letting the electorate decide on policy measures, direct democratic institutions add a veto player to political processes and change the decision-making game of a political system. Besides influences of interest groups and political actor's strategies, however, little is known about how institutional, political and other contextual factors bear on the use of direct democracy. This is of particular interest if ballot processes are neither initiated nor controlled by governing majorities. This contribution shows that institutions have little if no impact on the use of optional referendums and citizen-initiated petitions in Swiss cities. Rather, voting on uncontrolled ballots is largely determined by contextual variables, including foremost a commune's social complexity. In addition, the total number of other ballots, economic diversity and social satisfaction prove to be key to explaining optional referendum votes, whereas the launching of popular initiatives is explained by social complexity together with economic difficulties.     

拉丁美洲：和谐的民族,和谐的文化

近几年中国和拉丁美洲的关系有了很大发展,特别是文化交流进一步展开,这种文化交流不仅是传播中国文化,还有一个重要内容,就是拉美有许多优秀的文化成果,值得我们吸收和借鉴,以促进我国和谐社会的建设：     

Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America: Unexpected affinities

Why have political populism and economic liberalism coexisted under Presidents Menem in Argentina, Collor in Brazil, and Fujimori in Peru? In order to elucidate this surprising convergence, which established conceptions of populism did not expect, this article stresses some underlying affinities between neoliberalism and the new version of populism emerging in the 1980s. Both neopopulism and neoliberalism seek to win mass support primarily from unorganized people in the informal sector, while marginalizing autonomous organizations of better-off strata and attacking the “political class.” They both apply a top-down, state-centered strategy of wielding political power. Finally, neoliberal efforts to combat Latin America’s deep economic crisis yield some benefits for poorer sectors, to which neopopulist leaders appeal, while imposing especially high costs on many of the better-off opponents of neopopulism.     

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.     

Worlds Apart: Social Policy Regimes in Latin America

The region of Latin America exhibits significant diversity with regard to the size and scope of social protection programs. In this article, I propose a new way of measuring a country’s “social policy regime,” moving past expenditure-based conceptions of welfare provision to incorporate the coverage of programs. Employing this new measure, I use cluster analysis to demonstrate that Latin American social policy regimes cluster into four distinct categories. I then employ the comparative historical method to test a theory of why countries fall into each of these four categories. The analysis provides evidence that a country’s record of industrialization, the nature of political incorporation, and levels of ethnic and racial diversity are key determinants of the size and scope of Latin America’s social policy regimes.     

The Cost of Discrimination in Latin America

Indigenous and linguistic minorities are in an inferior economic and social position. The ethnic concentration of inequality is increasingly being recognized in the literature. In this review, studies from six Latin American countries that estimate the costs to an individual of being an economic minority are reviewed. The studies decompose the overall earnings gap into two components. One is the portion attributable to differences in the endowments of income-generating characteristics (“explained” differences) and the other is attributable to differences in the returns that majority and minority workers receive for the same endowment of income-generating characteristics (“unexplained”). This latter component is often taken as reflecting the “upper bound” of wage discrimination. In two studies for Bolivia, one using a 1966 survey and the other a 1989 survey, decomposition of the differential between indigenous and nonindigenous earnings leads to the conclusion that most of the overall differential is due to productivity. In Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, only one-half of the earnings differential can be attributed to differences in productivity-enhancing characteristics. In Paraguay, decomposition of the overall earnings differential between monolingual Spanish speakers and Guaraní speakers shows that most of the differential is explained by human capital differences. In Brazil, however, there is a significant cost to “being non-white.” Harry Anthony Patrinos is a Senior Education Economist at the World Bank. He leads the Economics of Education Thematic Group and manages EdInvest (www.worldbank.org/edinvest), the Education Investment Information Facility. He is co-author ofDecentralization of Education: Demand-Side Financing (1997). His latest co-edited book isPolicy Analysis of Child Labor: A Comparative Study (St. Martin's Press, 1999).Indigenous People and Poverty in Latin America: An Empirical Analysis (edited with George Psacharopoulos), was one of the first studies of the socioeconomic situation of indigenous peoples in Latin America.     

The process of democratization in Latin America

During the 1980s, Latin America experienced the longest and deepest wave of democratization in its history. The origins of this process of transformation are to be found in the interaction between domestic and international forces. At the international level, the key events were the oil shocks of the 1970s, the related expansion of international lending, and the subsequent debt crisis. The speed and extent to which these changes were translated into democratization were conditioned by the political alignments of the private sector and structural fragilities of authoritarianism at the national level. The persistence of the democratization trend through time reflects the importance of other factors, including global political change, the receding threat of the revolutionary left, the internationalization of capital markets, constraints on domestic policy choice, and political learning, which have converged at the domestic level to reduce the incentives and opportunities for authoritarian reversals.     

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.     

Religious Fractionalisation and Crimes in Disaster-Affected Communities: Survey Evidence from Bangladesh

This study employs unique household data collected in cyclone-affected communities in Bangladesh to investigate whether religious fractionalisation is associated with crime victimisation after disasters. The identification strategy relies on two characteristics of the study area: 1) its religious composition is stable; and 2) its households’ pre-disaster socio-economic status is uncorrelated with religious fractionalisation and disaster damage after controlling for the observed characteristics. The findings suggest that households in disaster-affected and religiously fractionalised communities are more likely to be victims after a natural disaster than are households in non-fractionalised communities. This study also finds empirical support for the idea that the result is driven by the misallocation of disaster relief in fractionalised communities.     

Institutions and Development in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis

We review the theoretical literature on the concept of institutions and its relationship to national development, propose a definition of the concept, and advance six hypotheses about institutional adequacy and contributions to national development. We then present results of a comparative empirical study of existing institutions in three Latin American countries and examine their organizational similarities and differences. Employing the qualitative comparative method (QCA) proposed by Ragin, we then test the six hypotheses. Results converge in showing the importance of meritocracy, immunity to corruption, absence of “islands of power,” and proactivity in producing effective institutions. Findings strongly support Peter Evans’ theory of developmental apparatuses.