The reconstruction of business interests after the ISI collapse: unpacking the effect of institutional change in Chile and Uruguay

This paper focuses on understanding the different evolutions of business’ associational paths in post-Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) Chile and Uruguay, offering an explanation at the crossroads of the institutional change and international trade literatures. The argument is that the different forms in which ISI institutions were transformed during the liberalisation period facilitated a greater mobility of factors to different degrees, triggering divergent enduring associational strategies on the part of business. The proliferation of narrow-based special benefits during the ISI fuelled preferences for the formation of sector- based coalitions oriented towards rent-seeking activities. Nevertheless, while ISI regulations were displaced in Chile during the military period, Uruguay followed a gradual process of layering of new rules alongside old ones. These diverging strategies, having different effect on established inter-sectoral regulatory distortions, propitiated alternative associational paths of local business.Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación FCE_1_2017_1_13544

The technocratic barrier to wage policy: theoretical insights from the Chilean Concertación

During the Latin American left turn, most governments rapidly understood the importance of committing to macroeconomic equilibriums, successfully managing to combine this goal with a wide array of social policies. Wage policy proved to be a conflictive arena coming from a period of harsh austerity measures. This article provides unique insights, from the Chilean Concertación governments (1990-2010) about the importance intra-left conflicts had in the advancement of labor collective rights. The working hypothesis is that the conflict between party leaders and technocrats alongside a perceived trade-off between growth and distribution is a prime factor for understanding wage reform outcomes. The analysis relies on a mixed-methods approach combining regression analysis and process-tracing. Chile’s labor reform attempts during the Concertación governments, with feeble societal linkages, provides relevant theoretical insights for the understanding of how the abovementioned perceived trade-off may have played in other cases, not only in Latin America but also in other regions of the developing world. The analysis is novel in bringing intra-left conflict back in as an important driver for labor relations reforms and improves our understanding of the political economy of intra-left conflicts during the post-neoliberal period

Primary education: changing mainstay of Uruguay

Traditionally one of the countries with highest levels of social and human development in Latin America, Uruguay is a small and eminently urban country, with an extended welfare state and universal education. From the beginnings of the twentieth century, education has been one of its main tools for promoting nationality and citizenship. The region and Uruguay experimented with different economic development models, switching development models from an Import Substitution Model (ISM) to an exportoriented model. As a result, the second half of the twentieth century entailed a series of changes in the social structures of the country. Poverty and inequality indicators grew and the architecture of the welfare state gradually lost its capacity to respond to a changing structure of social risks (Filgueira et al., 2005). Education was not insulated from these changes. In 1995, there is a revolution in the educational public system caused by the reform initiated by the national government. This reform has concentrated most of its strategies on equity in resources (with compensatory emphasis) and has resulted in centralized models that combine focused and universal resources assignment. In primary educational level, Full-Time School model has been its main and more successful tool. Eleven years after the beginning of the reform, the educational system faces, in terms of its organization, a set of tensions between the traditional structure and the emerging model. The challenges are four: Teachers’ stability in schools, degree of autonomy between the school and the central administration, cultural impoverishment of the underprivileged social sectors, and the necessity of basing the expansion of the new model on additional resources. This chapter provides an analysis of the educational system characteristics associated with these four tensions, and a discussion of the most important risks in terms of universalizing the emerging transformation

Trade Liberalization, Deindustrialization, and Inequality: Evidence from Middle-Income Latin American Countries

This article explores the relationship among trade liberalization, deindustrialization, and income inequality in the more industrially advanced Latin American countries. It argues that, among the most important liberal reforms implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, trade reform was especially detrimental to equality because it accelerated deindustrialization. The analysis provides evidence to support this mechanism. Therefore, as the liberalization of trade increased, the deindustrialization process produced an increase in inequality. In short, evidence shows how the process of economic integration to the global market, as it took place, produced an increase in inequality through the destruction of formal employment. Resumen: Este artículo explora la relación entre la liberalización del comercio, la desindustrialización y la desigualdad en el grupo de países con mayor desarrollo industrial relativo en América Latina. El artículo argumenta que, entre las reformas liberalizadoras más importantes llevadas a cabo en la región entre las décadas de 1980 y 1990, la liberalización del comercio fue especialmente nociva para la equidad de ingresos mediante la aceleración del proceso de desindustrialización. El análisis provee evidencia sobre este mecanismo. Entonces, mientras la liberalización del comercio avanzaba, el proceso de desindustrialización produjo un incremento en la desigualdad de ingreso. La evidencia sugiere que el proceso de integración al mercado global, del modo en que se llevó adelante, produjo un incremento en la desigualdad a través de la destrucción del empleo formal

Incorporation “from below”: insights from Bolivia and Uruguay

Recent empirical research shows that if we look at the nature of party-society linkages the differences between cases in the “moderate” and the “radical” strands of the Latin American left are less stark than we initially thought. Uruguay’s Frente Amplio (FA), for instance, has more in common with Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) than with Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT)—particularly in its degree of openness and responsiveness to the party’s social bases. In this article, we link this finding to broader macro political outcomes that are central in the study of Latin American political economy today. Bolivia and Uruguay are, in many ways, representative of broader regional trends of the early twenty-first century: both cases experienced a dramatic growth of the middle classes, the expansion of social programs benefiting large groups, notable declines in poverty as well as in social and economic inequalities, and the increased access of subordinate social groups to national decision-making. They have achieved, in short, significant progress advancing an agenda of incorporation, defined as the expansion of substantive citizenship rights. In this paper, we explain how party organizational attributes of the MAS and the FA, especially their strong societal linkages, have contributed to shaping such outcomes—which, despite similarities in their general tendency, vary in depth and scope across the two cases. We also trace how underlying socio-political pressures generated by each party’s organized social bases have constrained progress in areas that are crucial to sustaining important advances made in the past decade, such as labor, tax, education, and health reforms. This article draws on data collected through extensive fieldwork in Uruguay and Bolivia

Regulación del sistema educativo y desigualdades de aprendizaje en el Uruguay

En este artículo se muestra cómo determinados aspectos del sistema uruguayo de educación secundaria pública inciden en rendimientos desiguales de los alumnos. Al utilizar la edición 2006 del Programa Internacional de Evaluación de Estudiantes (pisa) (ocde, 2006a) resaltan tres aspectos clave de las instituciones reguladoras de la educación secundaria que contribuyen a reproducir las desigualdades iniciales, inhibiendo el papel igualador que orienta al sistema educativo. En primer lugar, el mecanismo de asignación de docentes produce un doble efecto de alta rotación de profesores jóvenes en establecimientos de enseñanza de contextos socioculturales desfavorables, así como un anquilosamiento de aquellos docentes más experimentados en establecimientos de contextos favorables. En segundo lugar, el sistema de distribución de alumnos basado en el radio escolar reproduce tel proceso de segregación residencial existente. Finalmente, con el sistema centralizado de provisión de materiales educativos y tecnológicos no se logra cubrir las necesidades de los establecimientos

Education system institutions and educational inequalities in Uruguay

This article shows how certain aspects at the secondary level of Uruguay’s public school system produce inequalities in student achievement. The 2006 edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (pisa) (oecd, 2006a) points to three key aspects of the institutions that regulate secondary education that play a part in reproducing inequalities of origin, hindering the equalizing role that guides the education system. First, the teacher assignment mechanism has the dual effect of sending a revolving door of young and inexperienced teachers to schools in unfavourable sociocultural contexts as well as concentrating teachers with more experience in schools in favourable contexts. Second, the geography-based system for assigning students to schools reproduces the residential segregation process. Lastly, the centralized system for supplying educational and technological materials is inadequate to the needs of the schools

Latin America

This chapter is organized into three sections. The first discusses the origins and development of Latin American welfare states before moving on to outline more recent reforms of social policy regimes in the area. A second section examines reasons why some policy regimes are more effective than others and discusses evidence concerning the impact of programmes in the different countries. The chapter concludes by discussing future directions for research on Latin American policy regimes

Varieties of skills profiles in Latin America: a reassess

Research on the politics of skills formation in Latin America is severely underdeveloped. This article offers a novel characterisation of the supply of skills in the region or ‘skills supply profiles’, taking inspiration from the comparative capitalisms literature. We identify four configurations of skills supply profiles – universalising, dual academic-oriented, dual VET-oriented and exclusionary – and analyse their historical dynamics. By doing this, we challenge general assessments of Latin America's skills formation systems as pertaining to one overarching type. This sets the stage for a deeper understanding of the politics of skills in the region and their connection with different development alternatives

State capacity and social investment: explaining variation in skills creation reforms in Latin America

Latin America has been historically characterized by a focus on compensatory social policies, state capacity problems and unstable political coalitions impairing political and policy sustainability. In the 1980s-90s socioeconomic transformations and a new international policy agenda put emphasis on skills creation. Considering skills creation as a key component of a social investment agenda, this chapter sheds light on how Latin American countries have engaged with this agenda and a legacy of low demand for skilled labor and chronic educational coverage and quality problems. We analyze one crucial scope condition for social investment expansion: state capacity. Looking at four countries with different state capacity levels and diverse reform outcomes –Bolivia, Guatemala, Chile and Uruguay–, we argue that state capacity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for skills creation social investment. State capacity matters at two crucial moments of the policy-making process: first, as a background variable that affects reform efforts, and second, during the policy implementation period. A second necessary but insufficient condition is how partisan coalitions interact with policy legacies. Rather, we show that only the two conditions together allow Latin American countries to advance social investment reforms in a sustainable fashion