Aldo Madariaga - Böcker

Education remains one of the biggest challenges for Latin American societies. However, the factors explaining this are hardly known, less so thoroughly understood. In Skills, Values, and Development: The Political Economy of Education in Latin America, the authors approach the education problem in 21st-century Latin America by considering it as a political economy issue. This political economy approach allows refocusing research from the supply of education (educational outcomes, institutions, and reform trajectories) in existing scholarship on policy reforms, to the conflicting demands of education by different actors at the intersection of political and economic dynamics.The book is divided into three sections: first, the authors examine how education expansion--or the lack of it--relates to common regional political trends, how these trends relate to skills, value-orientations, and developmental goals, and the conflictual dynamics between these goals. The second section of the book explores some of these issues from a historical perspective, while the final section discusses the political economy of investing in skills in the context of the region's attempts to successfully integrate itself into the knowledge economy and build more cohesive and prosperous societies. The book combines a variety of approaches and methodologies, including short and long-term perspectives, large N quantitative analyses, comparative methods, and country case studies.

An exploration of the factors behind neoliberalism’s resilience in developing economies and what this could mean for democracy’s futureSince the 1980s, neoliberalism has withstood repeated economic shocks and financial crises to become the hegemonic economic policy worldwide. Why has neoliberalism remained so resilient? What is the relationship between this resiliency and the backsliding of Western democracy? Can democracy survive an increasingly authoritarian neoliberal capitalism? Neoliberal Resilience answers these questions by bringing the developing world’s recent history to the forefront of our thinking about democratic capitalism’s future.Looking at four decades of change in four countries once considered to be leading examples of effective neoliberal policy in Latin America and Eastern Europe—Argentina, Chile, Estonia, and Poland—Aldo Madariaga examines the domestic actors and institutions responsible for defending neoliberalism. Delving into neoliberalism’s political power, Madariaga demonstrates that it is strongest in countries where traditional democratic principles have been slowly and purposefully weakened. He identifies three mechanisms through which coalitions of political, institutional, and financial forces have propagated neoliberalism’s success: the privatization of state companies to create a supporting business class, the use of political institutions to block the representation of alternatives in congress, and the constitutionalization of key economic policies to shield them from partisan influence. Madariaga reflects on today’s most pressing issues, including the influence of increasing austerity measures and the rise of populism.A comparative exploration of political economics at the peripheries of global capitalism, Neoliberal Resilience investigates the tensions between neoliberalism’s longevity and democracy’s gradual decline.

This book contributes to the current revival of dependency approaches for the analysis of global capitalism. Reflecting on contemporary uses of the “Dependency Research Program” (DRP) and a refined analytical toolkit, it makes two distinctive contributions to this revival: the analysis of new “situations of dependency”, and the understanding of the “mechanisms of dependency”. The individual chapters draw from a wide range of cases and data from Latin America and Europe and imbricate concepts and ideas from the DRP with those of other approaches, from post-Keynesian economics to structural economics, institutional economics, regulation theory, comparative capitalisms, business politics, economic geography and critical finance studies, providing a rich array of possibilities for virtuous inter-disciplinary cross-fertilization. This volume is a valuable contribution for those interested in understanding how global capitalism works in Latin America, Europe and beyond.