Robert Devlin

Towards an Evaluation of Regional Integration in Latin America in the 1990s

The decade of the 1990s has witnessed a wave of regional integration initiatives in Latin America: more than 14 agreements -free trade areas or customs unions- since 1990 with a handful more in varying degrees of negotiation (see Table 1). However, this was not just a Latin American phenomenon, as regionalism has more than ever become a global trend (Mistry [1996]). Indeed, now Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are the only World Trade Organization (WTO) members which are not signatories to at least one preferential trade agreement (WTO [1995]). Regional integration is not new to Latin America. Economic integration played an important role in the region?s early Post-War economic history. The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of very ambitious initiatives inspired by the successful Western European experience (Ffrench-Davis, Munoz and Palma [1994]). Indeed, at its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the topic of integration was hard to avoid in the discussion of Latin American development. However, disillusionment with integration processes had clearly set in by the late 1970s and the discussion of regional integration was all but silenced by the external crisis of the early 1980s.

The great Latin American debt crisis: a decade of asymmetric adjustment

In the 1980s, Latin America experienced the worst economic crisis since the world-wide depression of the 1930s. A common link running through this crisis was external indebtedness to the international private banking system.

Modern Industrial Policy and Public-Private Councils at the Subnational Level: Empirical Evidence from Mexico

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the use of industrial polices. The need for modern industrial policies has been increasingly acknowledged in the literature and by the praxis of developed and developing countries, including much of Latin America. Whether a country should have an industrial policy is no longer in question; rather, the issue is how to do it right. Nevertheless, research is still incipient on the experience with the specific institutional arrangements and governance structure required for effective modern industrial policy and the form that such institutions should take. This is especially true in large countries with developed subnational governance structures. One institutional mechanism considered vital to effective modern industrial policy is the modality of public-private dialogue and problem solving that supports a search for obstacles and solutions to agreed development objectives. This paper addresses industrial policy in general, but especially at the subnational level, with new empirical evidence from a large federal state: Mexico. It presents a detailed analysis of the governance of 32 newly created public-private State Productivity Commissions (Comisiones Estatales de Productividad, or CEPs). The analysis also is informed by new research on the longer experience of subnational public-private councils in Colombias national system of competitiveness and innovation.