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- Volume 2001, Issue 73, 2001
CEPAL Review - Volume 2001, Issue 73, 2001
Volume 2001, Issue 73, 2001
Cepal Review is the leading journal for the study of economic and social development issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. Edited by the Economic Commission for Latin America, each issue focuses on economic trends, industrialization, income distribution, technological development and monetary systems, as well as the implementation of reforms and transfer of technology. Written in English and Spanish (Revista De La Cepal), each tri-annual issue brings you approximately 12 studies and essays undertaken by authoritative experts or gathered from conference proceedings.
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Why is there so much economic insecurity in Latin America?
Author: Dani RodrikThe view that pervasive economic insecurity threatens political support for the ongoing market-oriented reforms has become one of the most common refrains in current discussions on Latin American affairs. Dealing with economic insecurity would thus appear to be a key part of the unfinished agenda of Latin America’s reforms. The author argues that economic insecurity in Latin America is multifaceted and has many sources that feed on each other. Some of the insecurity arises from the decline in employment protection and increased volatility of household outcomes. Some of it is the result of erratic capital flows and the systemic instability generated by a divorce between the instruments of stabilization and the real economy. Finally, an important component is the weakness of the institutions of voice and representation. Programmes aimed at social protection per se can be of partial help only. They will have to be complemented by applying macroeconomic policies, especially with regard to capital flows and the exchange rate, that are more conducive to the stability of the real economy and by loosening the control of financial markets over the instruments of macroeconomic policy. They will also require access to representative institutions –trade unions, political parties, and legislatures– with greater responsiveness and legitimacy than those that exist at present. But perhaps what Latin America needs most is a vision of how social cohesion can be maintained in the face of large inequalities and volatile outcomes, both of which are being aggravated by the growing reliance on market forces. The region will have to develop a vision that finds a way to ease the tension between market forces and the yearning for economic security.
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Strengthening regional financial cooperation
Author: Manuel R. AgosinThe severe international financial crises which rocked the Latin American economies in the 1980s and 1990s suggest that the international financial system suffers from serious defects. This article looks at one of the reforms which has been mooted in recent years: strengthening regional financial cooperation. It concludes that a Latin American fund made up of a modest portion of the reserves of the countries of the region, possibly backed up with contingency credits from the international banking system, could be an effective line of defense against financial crises caused by capital flight and could help to prevent the spread of crises within the region. A fund of this nature could also have other functions, such as providing finance to cope with balance of payments problems associated with temporary slumps in the terms of trade. It would also promote harmonization of the macroeconomic policies of its members, which is an essential condition for achieving more stable bilateral exchange rates and effective regional integration. Such a regional fund would not be a substitute for the International Monetary Fund, but would be complementary to it.
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The Latin American social agenda in the year 2000
Authors: Rolando Franco and Pedro SáinzNow that the 1990s have ended and a new millennium is dawning, the low rate of economic growth, the region’s vulnerability to international financial instability and the limited progress made in terms of equity oblige us to reflect on the social agenda for the future. An important role in that agenda will continue to be played by the efforts to overcome poverty and indigence, conditioned to a large extent by the region’s capacity for economic change and its dynamism in creating large numbers of jobs of higher quality in terms of productivity and income. At the same time, in view of the heavy burden of unfulfilled social needs that still persists, it is essential that social programmes should use their resources efficiently and –in order to be prepared for possible crises– safety nets should be established to cope with periods of recession. Those programmes must attach great importance to the creation of human capital, taking care to improve the present unsatisfactory distribution of education between the social strata, which is one of the symbols of Latin America’s social shortcomings. Education alone, however, is not enough to overcome the lack of equity, improve income distribution and generate a situation of social mobility which will give sons and daughters better opportunities for material well-being and social status than their parents had. Economic change should take advantage of the better levels of education achieved by creating more jobs of higher productivity, for which purpose it will be necessary to increase the present investment coefficients and the procurement and dissemination of technical progress. A better mix of labour, capital and technical progress will lay the foundations for more inclusive and equalitarian societies.
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Education and development in Brazil, 1995-2000
Author: Paulo Renato SouzaThis article analyses the education policies applied in Brazil in the six-year period from 1995 through 2000. After noting the need to prepare citizens and the country to face the twenty-first century, it addresses the long-standing lag in Brazilian education and the general characteristics of the educational system of that country. It then describes the educational policy options adopted in the period in question, which were aimed primarily at the expanding the system while improving its quality, and analyses the special features of the programmes in the field of basic education (understood as the education given from the earliest stages up to the end of secondary education); compensatory programmes aimed at keeping students in school; special education; literacy training plans, and the education of young people and adults. Next, it looks at the training of teachers, secondary and techno-professional training, and higher education, as well as matters connected with the transparency of information on the educational system and the possibilities of evaluating the system, the financing of education, and the implementation of the corresponding constitutional rules. The article ends with an analysis of the challenges and prospects of education in Brazil, noting that the main challenge is the pursuit of increasingly high levels of quality at all levels of education: an objective which is intimately linked with the upgrading of teachers and the financing of the system.
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Educational reform in Chile
Author: José Pablo Arellano MarínThis article analyses the reforms put into effect in the mid- 1990s with the aim of setting in motion a process of profound changes in pre-school, basic and secondary education in Chile, the main changes made, and some of the achievements and difficulties of this process as seen at the present day. It begins by describing the initial context of the reforms, in which, as the objectives of full coverage of the educational system had been largely achieved, the new objective addressed was to improve the quality of education with equity. It also makes reference to the institutional changes which had taken place in the organization of education: the consolidation of the system of subsidies and the transfer of educational establishments to the municipalities in the 1980s, and the change in teachers’ working conditions in the 1990s. It then summarizes the main initiatives taken to improve education in the 1990s. The central part of the article deals with the four main pillars of the educational reform process: programmes to improve and modernize teaching methods; the professional development of teachers and the incentives offered for this; the reform of educational curricula, and the introduction of full-day rather than half-day classes. It concludes with an appraisal of the achievements made and the difficulties encountered; among the first are the high priority given to education within the increased allocation of public and private resources, the emphasis on equity in the measures taken to improve education, and the continuity of the policies followed throughout the 1990s; among the second are the relatively poor results still obtained by most pupils and the learning gap that those results imply.
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Social protection for the poor in Latin America
Authors: Norman Hicks and Quentin WodonConfronted with recurrent macroeconomic shocks, governments in Latin America and the Caribbean have increasingly been concerned about establishing or strengthening systems of social protection and safety net programmes. The goal of these programmes is to help mitigate the impact of shocks on the poor before they occur, and to help the poor cope with the shocks once they have occurred. In this paper, we focus on publicly funded or mandated safety nets functioning as risk-coping mechanisms. The paper reviews the characteristics of a good safety net, in comparison with the main types of safety nets currently in place, and finds in general that no single programme meets all of the criteria in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, although some are better than others. Finally, what has been the actual record in terms of protecting the poor through targeted public spending during crises? The paper finds that because of fiscal constraints during a crisis, social spending is often pro-cyclical when ideally it should be counter-cyclical. Ironically enough, social protection spending itself does not appear to be protected.
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Old and new forms of citizenship
Author: Martín HopenhaynThis article holds that ensuring the full sway of economic, social and cultural rights makes it possible to advance towards greater equality of opportunities, both for attaining well-being and for asserting differences in the field of identity. This development of the effective use of rights must be complemented with new forms of citizenship connected with the possibility of interaction with the media and greater participation in the knowledge-based society. Only in this way does it seem feasible to give an ethical foundation to social and development policies which have been deprived of ideological bases. In this state of affairs it is necessary to build a political culture which transcends the merely formal nature of procedures and translates political action into forms of communication between different actors. The cultural construct of democratic citizenship necessarily involves such a pact or contract, which must provide space for the voices of a broad range of social actors and must have a real capability to prescribe forms of reciprocity and recognition in such diverse areas as access to justice, to social services, to informed political debate, and to the expression of opinions in the communication media.
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Brazil in the 1990s: An economy in transition
Author: Renato BaumannThe 1990s have been termed “the reform decade” in Brazil, because of the significant number of changes which took place in various aspects of that country’s economic and administrative policy. This article aims to systematically set forth the main features of those changes and analyse them in the light of the literature on reforms. It represents an attempt to sum up various studies made on the case of Brazil as part of a regional-level study coordinated by ECLAC. The article finds that in various aspects the results have been in line with those proposed by the literature in question, but not everything has turned out as planned or desired. It considers that this disparity of results can be explained by factors ranging from the way the reform process was designed, in some cases, to the different perceptions by the economic agents of the market signals associated with those changes.
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Job-seeking strategies in Trinidad and Tobago
Author: Kathleen ValtonenNational levels of unemployment in Trinidad and Tobago have remained consistently high since the 1980s, because of the economic recession, subsequent structural adjustment arrangements and the diminution of traditional labourintensive activities such as estate agriculture. Groups which had been dependent upon casual employment that was available in pre-recession times have been experiencing chronic unemployment. Combining extremely irregular casual employment with activity in the informal sector, they occupy a marginal and precarious position in the labour market. This study examines the way in which the characteristics and strategies of job-seekers differ in mainstream and in peripheral areas of the labour market. In analysis of the qualitative data, based on 45 in-depth interviews, Ragin’s qualitative comparative procedures were used. This method of analysing qualitative data permitted scrutiny of different individuals’ combinations of characteristics, and identification of those job search strategy components that led either to finding employment or to suffering long-term unemployment. The chronically unemployed showed a consistent lack of up-to-date knowledge of the labour market, whereas those who were successful in finding employment did have this type of information, through ‘weak ties’ based on family and previously established labour market links. The success in finding employment by individuals who lacked advanced secondary schooling and vocational training could be associated with their ‘ties of merit’ acquired from employment experience and a work record in the formal sector. The data suggest that while affiliation with the formal economy could strengthen an individual’s position in the labour market, association with the informal sector did not seem to give any later advantages in finding employment.
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