Juan A. Bogliaccini - 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.

Empowering Labor uses a comparative study of Chile, Portugal, and Uruguay to analyze the underlying political dynamics that shape the use of wage policy as a pre-distributive instrument of leftist parties in power in unequal democracies. The book theorizes that the unity of the Left and labor's political legitimacy are two main drivers for relating on wage policy as a pre-distributive instrument for promoting inclusion. These factors are shaped by elite long-term strategies towards labor. Such strategies, when dominant for long-enough periods, create path dependency, shaping differential opportunities for further options down the road. The book integrates large-scale historical processes with frequently analyzed short-term and agency-based factors to elucidate variation in the crafting of wage policies and reshapes the debate on the politics of pre-distribution in unequal democracies by situating the cases in a longer historical arc.