Recent changes in Latin American welfare states: is there social dumping?

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Kay
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Pension Reform ◽  
Financial Institution ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
International Financial Institution ◽  
Transition Costs ◽  
Social Security Privatization

The article evaluates the degree to which the recent wave of pension reform in Latin America can be considered social dumping. While competitive pressures did create incentives for reform, the region's pension systems were already becoming financially unsustainable, consuming greater percentages of GDP throughout the 1980s and 1990s. To the extent that the transition costs of privatization crowd out other – more redistributive – forms of social spending, as occurred in the Chilean case, social dumping may occur. However, it is problematic to speak of a single 'Latin American' trend in social spending in general or in pension reform in particular. The demonstration effect of the Chilean model, International Financial Institution support for privatization, and concerns about economic competitiveness provided incentives for governments to pursue privatization, but policy outcomes were filtered through the prism of domestic politics. Given the dismal financial and distributional picture of the old pay-as-you-go (PAYG) system and its steep transition costs (simply cutting benefits in the old system would be far cheaper), social security privatization is not readily explained as social dumping.

Papal visit is part of Cuba's international opening

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Financial Institution ◽  
State Institution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
White House ◽  
International Financial Institution ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
The Us ◽  
Paris Club

Significance Cuba is working on many fronts to advance its international insertion after the breakthrough restoration of diplomatic ties with the United States. However, progress is gradual and uneven. A first agreement on Cuba's debt has been reached with the Paris Club, underscoring Cuba's interest in regaining access to financial markets. The Latin American Development Bank (CAF) is the first international financial institution to engage with Cuba, but broader cooperation still faces difficulties. Impacts The popular pope's visit will strengthen the Church's political position as Cuba's most important non-state institution. It will also add to pressure on the US Congress from the White House to lift sanctions. Cooperation with CAF and other bodies will require Cuba to supply transparent and comprehensive economic data -- mostly still lacking. Economic reform is likely to see major new liberalisation measures before the Communist Party congress scheduled for April 2016.

scholarly journals Globalization, Domestic Politics, and Social Spending in Latin America: A Time-Series Cross-Section Analysis, 1973–97

2001 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert R. Kaufman ◽  
Alex Segura-Ubiergo
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Trade Integration ◽  
Education Spending ◽  
Negative Effect

This study examines the effects of globalization, democratization, and partisanship on social spending in fourteen Latin American countries from 1973 to 1997, using a pooled time-series error-correction model. The authors examine three sets of issues. First, following debates in the literature on OECD countries, they want to know whether social spending has been encouraged or constrained by integration into global markets. Within this context, they examine the extent to which such outcomes might be influenced by two additional sets of domestic political and institutional factors discussed in work on developed countries: the electoral pressures of democratic institutions and whether or not popularly based governments are in power.The authors show that trade integration has a consistently negative effect on aggregate social spending and that this is compounded by openness to capital markets. This is the strongest and most robust finding in the study. Neither democratic nor popularly based governments consistently affect overall social spending. The authors then disaggregate spending into social security transfers and expenditures on health and education. They find that popularly based governments tend to protect social security transfers, which tend toflowdisproportionately to their unionized constituencies; but they have a negative impact on health and education spending. Conversely, a shift to democracy leads to increases in health and education spending, which reaches a larger segment of the population. The authors conclude by emphasizing the contrasting political log-ics of the different types of social spending.

scholarly journals Diminished Expectations

2018 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisha C. Holland
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Formal Sector ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Original Survey

In Latin America, the relationship between income and support for redistribution is weak and variable despite the region's extreme income inequality. This article shows that this condition is rooted in the truncated structure of many Latin American welfare states. Heavy spending on contributory social insurance for formal-sector workers, flat or regressive subsidies, and informal access barriers mean that social spending does far less for the poor in Latin America than it does in advanced industrial economies. Using public opinion data from across Latin America and original survey data from Colombia, the author demonstrates that income is less predictive of attitudes in the countries and social policy areas in which the poor gain less from social expenditures. Social policy exclusion leads the poor to doubt that they will benefit from redistribution, thereby dampening their support for it. The article reverses an assumption in political economy models that welfare exclusion unleashes demands for greater redistribution. Instead, truncation reinforces skepticism about social policy helping the poor. Welfare state reforms to promote social inclusion are essential to strengthen redistributive coalitions.

scholarly journals Gendered Representation and Critical Mass: Women’s Legislative Representation and Social Spending in 22 OECD Countries

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 1097-1114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soon Seok Park
Keyword(s):  
Linear Models ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Percent Level ◽  
Mass Effect ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Critical Threshold ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Legislative Representation

To better understand the dynamics of representation of women’s interests such as public expenditure on healthcare, daycare, and education, this study examines statistical evidence for the notion of critical mass. To do so, this study uses the Comparative Welfare States Data Set and the piecewise regression method to produce two linear models that best fit to the data for different ranges of the share of seats in parliament held by women. The analysis fails to find consistent support for a threshold below which women legislators have little-to-no impact upon policy outcomes. By adjudicating seven hypothetical thresholds, the analysis also shows that when there is a critical mass effect, the 10 percent level is more a consequential threshold than 15, 20, or 30 percent levels. Findings suggest that we reject the idea of a critical threshold for women’s legislative representation. However, the relationship between the representation and social spending is robust with or without presumed critical mass.

Latin America and China’s Transnationalizing Oil Industry: A Political Economy Assessment of New Relations

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 626-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Hogenboom
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Oil Companies ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Regional Trends ◽  
Rapid Pace ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Changing Attitudes

Chinese oil companies have recently started to set up operations in Latin America, and they are doing this at a rapid pace. This article aims to provide an overview of the increasing flows of oil and capital (fdiand credit) between Latin America and China, and to clarify how they interact with the broader Sino-Latin American relations as well as Latin America’s changing political landscape. In addition to regional trends, the cases of Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador are discussed. The article combines an assessment of factual data with an analysis of the broader political economy context in which these new oil relations operate. Next to national differences, three general tendencies stand out: first, the type of arrangements and coordinated activities that Chinese companies, banks and government agencies deploy differ from those of other large oil-seeking nations; second, while the arrival of Chinese capital is welcomed by Latin American governments and pictured as part of non-imperialist South-South relations, Chinese oil companies and loans are sometimes criticized in local media by scholars, opposition andngos; and third, Chinese oil imports and investments have added to changing attitudes and policies towards strategic sectors under new political regimes, which allows for more social spending but which critics have labeled as the return to an ‘extractivist model.’

scholarly journals Elections and local government performance in Brazil

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (83) ◽  
pp. 580-599
Author(s):  
Pedro Luiz Costa Cavalcante
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Institutional Arrangement ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Government Performance ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
National Analysis

Abstract The 1988 federal Constitution introduced a complex and innovative institutional arrangement that not only reestablished political rights and democratic procedures, but also reinforced decentralization as a fundamental guideline for policy implementation in Brazil. As a result, municipalities have become pivotal actors in the policymaking process. Scholars of Latin American politics have given much emphasis to the causes and determinants of decentralization, but not much has been done toward a more general understanding of how this increased decentralization has affected policymaker behavior and policy outcomes. This paper aims to do exactly that. Specifically, it investigates how institutional arrangements and electoral competition affect local government performance. The theoretical basis is the electoral democratic theory that broadly highlights elections as instruments of citizen control in retrospective and prospective voting approaches. The research employs a large-N cross sub-national analysis based on a dataset of electoral, partisan, socioeconomic and public financial information collected from over 5500 municipalities. Local governments’ performance, our dependent variables, are synthetic indicators formulated from 2009 nationwide surveys on public education, health, housing and welfare services. The OLS regression results confirm the hypothesis that politics variables do matter in how politicians make decisions and implement policy under the new Brazilian democratic Era. The empirical evidences suggest that electoral competition does not present a direct effect on government performance, however, ideology and citizen participation do. Therefore, this paper helps to expand our understanding of a political system’s impact on public policy outputs, which is extremely important not only for academic purpose but also to support policymakers’ decisions.

4. The Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policies

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-108
Author(s):  
Michael J. Hiscox
Keyword(s):  
Exchange Rates ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
Domestic Sources ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the domestic sources of foreign economic policies. Different people in every society typically have different views about what their government should do when it comes to setting the policies that regulate international trade, immigration, investment, and exchange rates. These competing demands must be reconciled in some way by the political institutions that govern policy making. To really understand the domestic origins of foreign economic policies, we need to perform two critical tasks: identify or map the policy preferences of different groups in the domestic economy; and specify how political institutions determine the way these preferences are aggregated or converted into actual government decisions. The first task requires some economic analysis, while the second requires some political analysis. These two analytical steps put together like this, combining both economic and political analysis in tandem, are generally referred to as the political economy approach to the study of policy outcomes. The chapter then considers the impact of domestic politics on bargaining over economic issues between governments at the international level.

Who’s to Blame? The Distribution of Responsibility in Developing Democracies

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Alcañiz ◽  
Timothy Hellwig
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Foreign Debt ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Developing Democracies ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
World Markets ◽  
High Volatility ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

International structures tie the hands of policy makers in the developing world. Dependency on the world economy is blamed for low growth, high volatility and less redistribution of income than average, but the effect of international constraints on mass politics is relatively unknown. This study examines how citizens of developing democracies assign responsibility for policy outcomes. A theory of the distribution of responsibility, combining insights from the political economy of development and the study of mass behaviour, is presented. Evidence from seventeen Latin American countries shows that citizens often blame policy outcomes on international and private-sector actors, to which they, as voters, have no direct recourse. Ties to world markets and the International Monetary Fund, especially foreign debt, shift responsibility towards international actors and tend to exonerate national politicians.

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