Colin M. Lewis

The new institutional economics and Third World development

The new institutional economics is one of the the most important new bodies of theory to emerge in economics in recent years. The contributors to this volume address its significance for the developing world. The book is a major contribution to an area of debate still in its formative phase. The book challenges the orthodoxies of development, especially concerning the role of markets. It includes articles from Robert Bates, John Toye and Nobel Laureate Douglass North.

Social policy and economic development in South America: an historical approach to social insurance

Abstract This article examines the structural and organizational problems facing social insurance systems in Brazil and the Argentine through the twentieth century. It provides insights which inform contemporary debates about pension reform in Latin America. This area of social policy intervention is central to ongoing analyses of state competence and state capacity that in turn inform efforts to theorize about the state. Much of the present discussion depicts social insurance ‘crisis’ as a modern phenomenon. Similarly, preoccupations with the macroeconomic objectives of reform, such as the promotion of profitable pension funds as an adjunct to capital market deepening, long-term sustainability, equity and coverage, are often assumed to be peculiar to the late twentieth century. By contrast, this article stresses the generational and cyclical nature of the crises that have plagued social insurance regimes in both countries. It notes that pension funds established for influential groups of workers in the early twentieth century quickly developed substantial deficits and that this was a key factor driving the extension of social insurance (and hence the pool of contributors). Financial instability was exacerbated by states frequently raiding pension funds in lieu of effective fiscal systems. As part of this, the article analyses historic shifts between different social insurance ‘models’ (individual, capitalized accounts versus pay-as-you-go schemes and monopolistic state systems versus competitive arrangements), evaluating their impact on coverage, equity, financial stability and administrative effectiveness. The article also identifies what may be learnt from differences, as well as similarities, between the two systems. Key points of divergence include the relatively large historic role of the private sector in Brazil and the earlier substantive provision for rural workers there. These differences call into question assertions about the common nature and origins of social insurance crises in Latin America, and in turn about the nature of the state itself. The article finds that, unlike models of Western European welfare capitalism with which they are sometimes compared, social insurance regimes in Brazil and the Argentine were precocious and institutionally fragile. They were also ad hoc and subject to repeated ‘reform’. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the economic weight of the state in middle-income Latin American countries (particularly as regards economic outreach and social policy interventions) seemed to approach that of socialist countries in Eastern Europe. Yet the ‘ideology’ of growth often owed more to liberal capitalism, echoing East Asias emphasis on ‘state-supported late industrialization’. These contradictions are neatly captured in the historical trajectory of social insurance systems, which demonstrate that Latin American does not fit neatly with categorizations established in the varieties of capitalism discourse.

Welfare, poverty and development in Latin America

Acknowledgements - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction C.Abel & C.M.Lewis - Evolution of Aggregate Welfare and Development Indicators in Latin America and the OECD, 1950-1985 J-M.A.Bertrand - Determinants of Social Insurance/Security Costs and Coverage C.Mesa-Lago, M.A.Cruz-Saco & L.Zamalloa - Urban Wages and Welfare I.Roxborough - Self-help Housing during Recession A.Gilbert - Growth, Distribution and Basic Needs in Peru and Columbia R.Thorp - Bonos, Beneficios y Bienestar A Study of Wages, Work and Welfare on Peruvian Sugar Plantations C.D.Scott - Social Insurance: Ideology and Policy in the Argentine, c. 1920-1960 C.M.Lewis - Welfare, Oil Workers and the Labour Movement in Venezuela S.Ellner - Utopia in Uruguay Redefined: Social Welfare Policy after 1940 H.Finch - Education and Training in Colombia, 1940s to 1960 A.Helg - Puerto Rico: A Model of Welfare Capitalism, C. 1945-1970 C.Abel - Social Equality, Agrarian Transition and Development in Cuba, 1945-1990 J.Stubbs - Social Security in Haiti: Informal Initiatives in a Welfare-less State M.Lundahl - Market Modernization Policy in Bogota: Welfare Consequences for Low-Income Market Sellers C.O.N.Moser - Politics, Equity and Social Security Politics in Brazil J.M.Malloy & C.A.Parodi - Welfare in Nicaragua: The Somocista and Sandinista Experiences Compared P.Sollis - The Campaign Against Absolute Poverty in Colombia: An Evaluation of Liberal Social Policy A.Puyana - Mobilization and the Quest for Recognition: The Struggle of Rural Women in Southern Brazil for Access to Welfare Benefits A.Brumer - Non-Governmental Organizations and Development in Brazil under Dictatorship and Democracy A.Hall - Chilean Education Policy: Authoritarianism and Democracy A.J.Weitzman - Index

Latin America, economic imperialism, and the state : the political economy of the external connection from independence to the present

Part 1 The debate: dependency and the historian - further objections dependency revisited the hegemonic form of the political - a thesis. Part 2 The aftermath of independence: the transition from colonialism in Colombia, 1819-1875 protectionism and industrialization in Mexico, 1821-1854 - the case of Puebla economic policy and growth in Chile from independence to the war of the Pacific. Part 3 The classical age of imperialism: the state and business practice in Argentina, 1862-1914 railways and industrialization - Argentina and Brazil, 1870-1930 external forces and the transformation of Peruvian coastal agriculture 1880-1929 British imperialism in Uruguay - the public utility companies an the batllista state, 1900-1930. Part 4 The era of disputed hegemony: the political economy of revolutionary Mexico, 1900-1940 external disequilibrium and internal industrialization - Chile, 1914-1935 politics and the economy of the Dominican Republic, 1890-1930 dependency, historiography and objections to the Roca pack Anglo-Brazilian economic relations and the consolidation of American pre-eminence in Brazil, 1930-1945. Part 5 The new order: the US, the Cold War and Peron Latin America and the new international division of labour - a critique of some recent views state, multinationals and the working class in Brazil and Mexico foreign finance and capital accumulation in Latin America - a critical approach a reappraisal of the role or primary exports in Latin America transnational corporations, comparative advantage and food security in Latin America.

Economic restructuring and labour scarcity: labour in the 1920s

The inter-war decades witnessed dramatic change which left a profound impact upon the course of Argentine development during the latter part of the twentieth century. Historians and political scientists re-examine the 1920s and 1930s in order to determine the nature — and to explain the failure — of Radicalism, the rise of Peronism and the descent into political instability which became such a marked characteristic of Argentine politics between the 1950s and the 1980s. Social historians have tended to qualify optimistic accounts of economic progress during the ‘Indian Summer’ of the so-called golden age of export-led growth by pointing to rural poverty, disease, class conflict, urban squalor and the generally inadequate living conditions of the mass of the population around the First World War. Only recently have some of these more gloomy accounts been challenged.1

Book Review: European Cable Companies in South America before the First World War

order. In examining issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the successor states, Ádám points out that Woodrow Wilson was against the disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy and, more surprisingly, that, according to the French archives, Clemenceau wished to create a unified Central Europe at the conclusion of the war. Of course, the circumstances changed and a number of new states were created in East-Central Europe. The author argues that the Entente powers then attempted to set up a system to protect minority rights, since it was clear from the beginning that this issue was going to be important for the new Europe. Yet the new states decided to make the fiction of nation-states a reality, by seeking to assimilate their minorities. Here, most of Ádám’s attention is on the approximately threeand-a-half million Hungarians living in Hungary’s new neighbouring states. The last piece in the volume examines the Munich settlement which dismantled Czechoslovakia. Instead of focusing just on the Great Powers, which is the story told by most accounts, Ádám devotes her attention to the role played by the small states of EastCentral Europe in making the Munich agreement possible. Interestingly, Hungary’s faltering attitude towards German policy may have helped persuade Hitler to accept the compromise at Munich instead of turning to complete dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Ádám’s methodology is that of traditional diplomatic history, which for many readers may not be appealing, but as she herself points out, in the 1920s and 1930s ‘diplomats still played a (perhaps undeservedly) significant role in shaping the fortunes of millions of people who were often unaware of the fateful decisions that were being made in their names’ (xviii). True indeed, and these carefully researched and well written studies have many important things to say about them. This book should become required reading for scholars interested in the history of inter-war East-Central Europe.