Gradual Economic Reform In Latin America

Gradual Economic Reform in Latin America questions why most Latin American countries have not nearly completed neoliberal economic reforms. Examining Costa Rica as an important example of the gradual, as opposed to radical, approach, Mary A. Clark utilizes over one hundred fifty interviews as well as secondary data to present ten mini-case studies of structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s. In analyzing the economic, social, and political outcomes of Costa Rica's experience, Clark concludes the gradual approach has yielded positive results, and compares this country's experiences with that of other Latin American welfare states.

A first of its kind to hit the market, this text provides an overview of recent political, economic and business developments in Latin America. Written by leading economists and scholars in the field, it gives a current, comprehensive introduction to the problems and issues involved in Latin America's recent economic reform processes, an understanding essential to international business students, business people eyeing Latin American markets, as well as professionals, scholars, and students interested in the area. The text is appropriate for graduate and undergraduate courses offering a primary or secondary focus on recent developments in Latin America.

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.

Gusatvo Flores-Macias' After Neoliberalism? offers the first systemic explanation of why the ever-popular left-wing governments in Latin American countries have become extremely radical or moderate once in power.

Covers the period from the 1970s to 1998.

Analyses processes of democratization and economic reform in five Latin American countries from the early 1980s to 1993.

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.

This book is a part of a project to study the economic reforms implemented in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last two decades. This publication analyzes the investment process and attempts to link macroeconomic aspects to sectoral, microeconomic and institutional factors. Thus, it examines the impact of structural reform, institutional change and market structures in conjunction with important legal and regulatory aspects. The book also contributes to the understanding of the investment process in the context of the economic reforms.