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- Volume 2000, Issue 70, 2000
CEPAL Review - Volume 2000, Issue 70, 2000
Volume 2000, Issue 70, 2000
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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Brazil: Options for the future
Author: Celso FurtadoThis article analyses the present situation and future prospects of Brazil in the light of the globalization process. In the author’s view, the market only generates globally coherent decisions in countries with a high degree of social homogeneity. Thus, the greater the social heterogeneity of a country, the greater the need for a national development policy. Such a policy should link up the concepts of globalization and social profitability on the economic and political level. Globalization furthers the destructuring of production systems in favour of companies that plan their investments on an international scale and promotes the concentration of political power, widening of the productivity gap, and the destructuring of cultures. Social profitability, on the other hand, has to do with the priorities of economic decision-making in national political systems and allows the values of the community as a whole to be taken into account. In a country of continental size, with great population mobility, the danger of disintegration of the national production system makes it hard to subordinate the channeling of investments to the rationale of the transnational corporations. If globalization is an unavoidable technological imperative, then the country has little room for taking its own decisions. The author concludes that in these circumstances countries like Brazil, with great natural resources and marked social disparities, may disintegrate or slither in the direction of fascist-type authoritarian regimes in response to the growing social tensions. In order to escape from this prospect it is necessary to return to the idea of a national project and make the domestic market once again the dynamic centre of the economy. The greatest difficulty is in reversing the tendency towards income concentration, which can only be done through a great social mobilization process.
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Major macroeconomic disturbances, expectations and policy responses
Author: Daniel HeymannThe episodes of great financial volatility and wide fluctuations in the level of activity of a number of economies have heightened the debate on how major macroeconomic fluctuations are generated and spread. Although it is acknowledged that much can be learned from the study of specific cases, in the literature decisions are often presented as though the agents adopting them were fully aware of all the relevant probability distributions. It is desirable, however, that in analysing these phenomena it should be recognized that both the economic agents and policy-makers are acting in variable contexts, with perceptions and expectations that change according to the inferences that each one draws from the evolution of the surrounding environment. In these conditions, the interpretation of fundamental variables such as the fiscal deficit or the current account balance is necessarily conditioned by conjectures about their future evolution: it cannot be maintained, then, that the state of the “fundamentals” is directly observable. The changing perceptions of the agents can thus result in big fluctuations in expenditure and credit conditions. This article addresses file problems of expectations which can give rise to failures in the coordination of intertemporal plans and consideres policies which could prevent or reduce such upsets; analyses, with regard to fiscal matters, the evaluation by the public sector of its budgetary constraints over time and the possible application of counter-cyclical measures; reviews the alternatives open in terms of the choice of exchange-rate systems in economies with different characteristics (especially the greater or lesser use of foreign currencies as denominators in contracts) and the design of financial policies; briefly refers to the international transmission of macroeconomic impulses, and finally offers some conclusions.
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Automatic fiscal stabilizers
Author: Ricardo MarinerIn this article, indicators of fiscal discretionality are estimated using a simple methodology, and in this way the cyclical component of the public accounts balance (i.e., the amounts of income and expenditure associated with transitory movements of the level of activity) is identified for a number of Latin American countries in the 1990s. The difference gives a measure of the discretional balance, which represents a medium-term indicator of the state of the public accounts. Budgetary mles which take account of these mechanisms not only ensure sustainability over time but also reduce the cyclical nature of the public finances, provided they are applied in a transparent and symmetrical manner. This method provides series which make it possible to follow up the structural and cyclical components of public deficits in Latin America, using a standard methodology and with minimal information needs, in order to focus the relevant discussions (and the necessary adjustments) on a medium-term horizon.
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Financial openness: The experience of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico
Authors: Maria Cristina Penido de Freitas and Daniela M. PratesThis article seeks to analyse the effects of globalization on the financial systems of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, which were the countries that received most of the foreign investment in the region in the 1990s. This capital was mostly made up of portfolio flows and investments in shares traded on the local financial systems. The movement was not homogeneous in all the countries, because of their different degrees of openness and differences in macroeconomic policies. In the case of the portfolio investments, the effects of the openness were concentrated in different segments and they therefore had different impacts on the financial systems in question. The recent experience of these countries shows that there is still some room for national economic policies to take action in the context of financial globalization, even though their capacity to reduce the perverse effects of financial flows is limited. Foreign firms are observed to be assuming growing importance in the countries studied, as a function of the degree of openness of the local financial systems. This tendency is due to the liberalization measures adopted in order to make possible capitalization of the banking systems and competition among banks to find new sources of profits and strengthen their position in globalized markets. Although the predominance of foreign companies has given a more solid capital base to the national banking systems, it could have an adverse macro- economic impact, especially in Mexico and Brazil, which still maintain relatively independent monetary policies.
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The Spanish banks’ strategies in Latin America
Authors: Alvaro Calderón and Ramón CasildaAfter more than ten years of a broad-ranging and extensive process of financial liberalization and deregulation, the Latin American picture in the banking, insurance and pension fund markets has been significantly changed by the massive presence of globalized financial institutions. The major Spanish banks have been among the main actors in this respect and have become leading figures in most countries and business segments. From the Latin American standpoint, the entry of foreign banks, especially those of Spain, has helped to invigorate and modernize the financial systems of the region; has brought in new instruments and technologies; has increased competition, with direct effects on access to credit and its cost, and has given the local financial systems greater strength and stability. However, it has also given rise to some difficulties, such as greater concentration and only a very slow process of handing on to clients the benefits of the greater competition and efficiency achieved in the Latin American financial markets. This extensive presence of Spanish banks, together with the active expansion of Spanish non-financial companies in the main Latin American markets, has revealed the limitations of the local regulatory frameworks for coping with the growing globalization of international markets. Thus, decisions taken in Europe affect users in Latin America, causing reactions at various levels whose results will only become evident in the future.
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Hirschman’s view of development, or the art of trespassing and self-subversion
Author: Clovis UltramariThis article analyses the work of Albert Hirschman from the standpoint of two basic concepts: trespassing and self-subversion. Hirschman turned these exercises into an art, pleading his case in a manner which combines curiosity and intellectual humility. In a world accustomed to think and think of itself through totalizing models, in a continent where so many ideological models which sought to open up (or rather, force open) the realities of countries were put together and taken apart, Hirschman’s works and intellectual attitude represent a healthy and beneficial invitation to take a different view. This is not his only merit, however. From Chile to Brazil, from Mexico to Argentina, he passed on his passion for the possible to more than a few admirers. In the last few years, a great many ministers, academics and leading members of international organizations have repeatedly praised his contributions. Likewise, many of the concepts developed by Hirschman -his “exit, voice and loyalty” triptych, the notion of the “tunnel effect”- and above all his propensity to think in terms of the possible and his efforts to trespass over and subvert theories (including his own), paradigms and models, and all the cubist and minimalist mental exercises that are constantly created and recreated, are healthy sources of inspiration and interpretation for rethinking the never-ending quest for development. Lastly, notions like community participation or social capital, which are now major subjects of discussion, can also be better appreciated, subverted and self-subverted in the light of Hirschman’s work.
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Prevention or repression? The false dilemma of citizen security
Authors: Irma Arriagada and Lorena GodoyThere is a marked contrast between the growing sense of insecurity among the population and the absence of consolidated statistics that would allow the phenomenon to be measured more objectively. This article seeks to make a contribution to the knowledge of the situation of citizen insecurity affecting the region, taking a comparative view based on the limited and not always reliable information available and looking at the problem from various standpoints, both social and economic. The authors begin by examining some manifestations of criminal violence in the 1990s, especially in urban areas, after which they review the most important theories on the study of violence, the profiles of victims and attackers, traditional and emerging forms of delinquency, the frequent relation between violence and unemployment, the economic cost of violence and delinquency, and the main policies adopted to deal with them. They then go on to examine the measures taken in the region with regard to citizen security, which have shown the need to use more integral forms of prevention (primary and secondary) and control for dealing with criminal violence and to consolidate the systems of crime statistics of the region in order to be able to identify the factors with the greatest incidence on criminal violence and the less visible forms taken by the latter.
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How domestic violence came to be viewed as a public issue and policy object
Authors: Kathya Araujo, Virginia Guzmán and Amalia MauroThis article analyses the process whereby domestic violence in Chile became a subject of open discussion and a public issue included in the institutional agenda of the Executive and the Legislature, giving rise to preventive programmes against such violence and public services for aiding its victims, together with the adoption of a law against intra-family violence in 1994. The analysis highlights the dynamic and complex nature of the process, whose course and results were not and could not be determined a priori. Public issues do not exist in their own right, as purely objective phenomena, but are constructed by actors who operate in different settings, exchanging and confronting discourses based on various frames of interpretation. Several different phases may be distinguished in the process, depending on the features and opportunities offered by the political and institutional system, the different types of actors involved, their organizational resources, the structure of the links they establish with each other, and the frame of interpretation that guides what the actors do. Seen from this standpoint, the emergence of cases of violence as a public issue is at the same time the story of the establishment of women as valid social subjects, their organizations, their strategies for mobilizing the issue in different public contexts, and the spread of new types of discourse and proposals on gender-related matters.
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Options for rural poverty reduction in Latin America and the Carribbean
Author: Rubén G. EcheverríaAlthough most of the total population and the majority of the people living in poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean are in urban centres, poverty is, in relative terms, still a rural phenomenon in the region. The incidence of poverty and of extreme poverty is much larger in rural areas than in urban settings. As recently as 1997, more than half of all rural households were living in poverty, and close to a third of them were in extreme pwverty conditions. Moreover, the fragile economic situation of most countries in the region during the past two years may well have worsened those figures. The rural poor in the region face at least three basic challenges: (i) inadequate nutrition and poor health and educational services; (ii) few opportunities for productive employment in agricultural and/or non-farm activities; and (iii) lack of sufficient levels of organization to lobby effectively for rural interests. The number and diversity of circumstances that cause rural poverty, as well as the heterogeneity of rural poverty conditions across and within countries and regions, constitutes a challenge to develop cost-effective solutions to improve the well-being of rural inhabitants. The objective of this article is to highlight several options for the reduction of rural poverty in the region. It therefore foeuses on three important and eomplementary options for generating and raising income levels among the rural poor: those based on growth in the agricultural sector, those targeting the sustainable use and conservation of natural resources; and those based on the growing signifieance of rural off-farm economie activities. There are at least two other options for reducing rural poverty : the traditional migration to urban areas, and targeted assistance to those who need income transfers to either rise above the poverty line and/or have minimum access to safety nets.
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Equity in education in El Salvador
Author: Alvaro Carrasco GuzmánIn terms of equity of educational opportunities, the region displays great problems, and El Salvador is no exception to this. The analysis given here of the shortcomings in respect of equity of education in that country begins with a general description of the fundamental lines of action proposed in the educational reform process. A study is then made of the differences in access to education, the intergenerational transmission of educational opportunities, and disparities in the quality of education. It is noted that education has an instrumental function -economic reproduction- but it also has a function of promoting change in pursuit of a more equitable society. It is asserted that the contribution education can make to development has its limits, and the effect of poverty on educational opportunities and hence on individuals’ real possibilities of getting on in the world is highlighted. Finally, some ideas are put forward for maximizing the contribution of education to the development of El Salvador.
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