Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

This paper argues that the recent boom in the Latin American economies can be explained by the conjunction of two external factors not found together since the 1970s: strong commodity prices (more so for hydrocarbons and mining products than for agricultural commodities) and exceptional external financing conditions. Concerning the latter the key development was the massive influx of capital during two periods of “exuberance” in international financial markets (between mid-2004 and April 2006 and between mid-2006 and mid-2007) particularly the second. It also argues for the importance of spreading and consolidating Latin America’s two great (and complementary) macroeconomic policy innovations of recent years: countercyclical fiscal management (still confined to just a few countries) and active intervention in currency markets. Such intervention needs to be based on a growing recognition that the real exchange rate ought to be an explicit goal of macroeconomic policy.

This research assesses the effectiveness of the Brazilian public health system and of private insurance in Brazil in providing financial protection in health care. The determinants of catastrophic health expenditures are estimated by probit regressions with Heckman selection adjustment controlling for health-care need. Findings show that the public system provides a significant reduction (47%) in the probability of a household having catastrophic health expenditures and that private insurance makes such expenditures more likely by 36%. Recommendations include improvements in the quantity accessibility quality and reliability of public providers more appropriate provision of drugs by the public system and tighter regulation of private insurance.

This lecture discusses the features of the colonial situation in Latin America that conditioned the region’s economic and social performance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It deals in particular with Argentina looking at the events following the First World War through to the beginning of the Second World War. Those events were formative in the education and experience of Raúl Prebisch who 30 years later would give ECLAC its fundamental characteristics. The lecture examines the ideas that ECLAC contributed to the debate on Latin American development and the evolution of the countries that applied those ideas. It also looks at the external and internal circumstances that changed the context in which development policies were implemented from the middle of the 1970s onwards. Lastly it identifies the most recent changes in the world economic situation and the role of ECLAC in defending the ideas of freedom well-being and tolerance which are the essence of modern civilization.

One of the characteristics of globalization has been the marked volatility of financial flows. The realization that this was affecting growth and equity induced the International Conference on Financing for Development held in Monterrey in 2002 to adopt a global commitment to deal with the issue of development financing. Since then there has been a mixture of progress backsliding and inaction. This article conducts a brief review of financial globalization and the current global crisis. It then examines the Monterrey Consensus the evaluations by the United Nations Secretariat of compliance with the commitments accepted and the financial system reforms needed to make globalization more equitable. It then proceeds to a stocktaking of the progress made under a North-South collaboration initiative Action against Hunger and Poverty in applying “innovative financing mechanisms” that can contribute to attainment of the Millennium Development Goals and help developing countries cope with critical situations like the current global recession. It concludes with proposals for dealing with the challenges that remain.

The social cost of the crisis of the 1980s and the consequent application of adjustments to the economy has been giving rise to a number of problems in the region which together with the marked regression in the main vital indexes are causing fresh social tensions in the systems of institutions as weli as taking other forms of expression too despite the substantial advances made in the exercise of representative democracy in recent years.

This paper posits the need for a study in greater depth to identify the special features of the structurai heteroge* neity of the Latin American economies. Such a study is needed regardless of whether this phenomena is defined ultimately as the presence of marked inequalities in the productivity of labour between different sectors of the economy or whether the heterogeneity of the economies of Latin America is understood fundamentaliy as a significant relative lag of agriculture compared with other sectors of the economy.

This article seeks to answer the question posed in the title which refers in particular to men in the lower-class urban sectors. The statistics reflect a type of behavior marked by an avoidance of the obligations connected with the formation and maintenance of a family leading to an increase in rates of illegitimacy in the proportion of adolescent pregnancies and in the rates of abandonment of families with children.

The neoliberal view is that outward orientation and general liberalization should result in efficient factor allocation and thus in the formation of competitive economic structures. Its policy recommendations are therefore generally in the “get prices right” mould.

This article analyses the relationship between growth and income distribution. The existence of a conflict between these two variables depends on a country’s level of development. Such conflicts arise during intermediate stages of development when growth is led by savings and tend to disappear when growth becomes a knowledge-led phenomenon. Part of the reason for this is that saving is much more concentrated than education and technology are. The author contends that the conflict is not insuperable however; in practical terms it can be corrected by means of fiscal and educational policy measures.

The Central American countries have a 40-year tradition of cooperation based on bilateral and multilateral treaties the most important of which is the General Treaty on Central American Economic Integration under whose terms the Central American Common Market (CACM) was established in 196b. Nevertheless the industrial policies pursued by these countries since that time are notable for their lack of uniformity.