Apertura Econ Mica Y Empleo

Evaluates the proportions by which increases in production and reductions by employment have contributed to productivity.

Comprises six articles discussing the effects of structural adjustment on employment, productivity and income.

Originally published in 2004. Growth, income distribution, and labour markets are issues of pivotal importance in the Latin American context. Examining unique theoretical issues and the empirical evidence, this book provides a critical analysis of the key elements of income distribution determinants, labour market functions, trade policies, and their interrelations. As the advance of globalization becomes seemingly unstoppable, this book provides an important reappraisal of the impact of this new phenomenon, and in particular, the pernicious impact it may have on income growth and distribution. The key objective of the volume is to integrate more fully the analysis of trade and labour market economists, in order to better understand the labour market and income distribution implications of globalization and international integration. Forty years after the early calls to appropriately investigate the micro foundations of macroeconomics, the separation of the two at the policy level is more damaging than ever before - particularly for developing regions; this volume therefore makes an important contribution at the theoretical and policy levels by bringing together macroeconomic and microeconomic analyses.

Analyzes the rise and fall of the Red de Trueque (launched in 1995 by a group of environmentalists who exchanged goods and services at their own 'market' using a system of mutual credit) in Argentina. This book identifies rules of governance and sustainability for institutional settings in which state regulation is minimal.

The principal themes pursued in this book emerge from the great transformation that the Latin American and the Caribbean economies experienced in the aftermath of both the foreign debt crisis of 1982 and the macroeconomic stabilisation policies that vividly and painfully produced the so-called "lost decade" of the 1980s. Latin America implemented an economic liberalisation process during the late 1980s and the 1990s. The main policy reforms involved in that course can be summarized as privatization of state owned firms, trade openness, deregulation of the foreign direct investment (FDI) regime and fiscal discipline. Latin American countries have also embarked in regional trade agreements, the most important ones being Mercosur and the North American Free trade Agreement (NAFTA). This book compares results from the experience of North-South and South-South moulds of integration. Thus, the impacts of these policies on growth, development, technological progress, poverty and inequality are analysed. Orthodox and heterodox economic policies and theories are discussed along with relevant empirical evidence with a view to assess, on the one hand, the relative merits of the various policy reforms applied by different countries in the region, and on the other, the experience of integration into the global economy. There are thirteen chapters in this collection linked in varying ways to the series of economic reforms introduced in the region in the last decades. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, students and policymakers interested in the study of economic development in emerging economies and in particular in Latin America.

Arguing that economic policies in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico favor markets over institutions and the international economy over the domestic - to the detriment of the workforce in those countries - this publication presents extensive evidence in support of placing employment concerns at the center of economic and social policies. The authors discuss the challenges the three countries face in creating employment, as well as the evolution of the labor market since 1990 in terms of the quantity and quality of jobs. They then explore the impact of five policy areas on employment creation: macroeconomic policy, trade liberalization, foreign direct investment, labor market regulations and policies, and social dialogue. Their concluding recommendations offer concrete steps for balancing market forces and policy intervention in the interest of employment growth in a sound economy

This volume is a successor of sorts to the Institute's 1986 volume Toward Renewed Economic Growth in Latin America, which blazed the trail for the market-oriented economic reforms that were adopted in Latin America in the subsequent years. It again presents the work of a group of leading Latin American economists who were asked to think about the nature of the economic policy agenda that the region should be pursuing after a decade that was punctuated by crises, achieved disappointingly slow growth, and saw no improvement in the region's highly skewed income distribution. The study diagnoses the first-generation (liberalizing and stabilizing) reforms that are still lacking, the complementary second-generation (institutional) reforms that are necessary to provide the institutional infrastructure of a market economy with an egalitarian bias, and the new initiatives that are needed to crisis-proof the economies of the region to end its perpetual series of crises. Contributors: Daniel Artana, Nancy Birdsall, Roberto Bouzas, Saúl Keifman, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, Ricardo López Murphy, Claudio de Moura Castro, Fernando Navajas, Patricio Navia, Liliana Rojas-Suarez, Jaime Saavedra, Miguel Székely, Andrés Velasco, John Williamson, and Laurence Wolff.

Examines the nature of the economic policy agenda that the region should be pursuing after the better part of a decade that was punctuated by crises, achieved disappointingly slow growth, and saw no improvement in the region's highly skewed income distribution. Diagnoses the first-generation (liberalizing and stabilizing) reforms that are still lacking, the complementary second-generation (institutional) reforms that are necessary to provide the institutional infrastructure of a market economy with an egalitarian bias, and the new initiatives that are needed to crisis-proof the economies of the region to end its perpetual series of crises.