Search

Paper Abstract.x000d..x000d.During the 1990s, Latin America experienced major privatization programs, which shifted the provision of provision of utility services from the public to the private sector. This trend peaked by 1997, and fell steadily ever since. By 2001, the political situation that favored privatization began to fade away. Several factors began to turn against private ownership of public utilities, leading to the re-nationalization of several companies in Argentina, Bolivia, and Venezuela and the renegotiation of concession contracts in other countries. The paper aims at identifying the political and economic factors that have led to the demise of private participation in public utilities and the resurgence of economic nationalism in selected Latin American countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does party nationalization shape the budgetary process and the structure of public spending? In this paper I examine the consequences of party nationalization on the political budget cycles in Latin America and argue that there exists a strong but non-linear relationship among static nationalization (the degree in which political parties’ support is consistent across the country), dynamic nationalization (similarity of the change in that support across electoral districts), and the government’s ability to control fiscal deficits. I build a simple formal model of policy formation in the context of proportional representation systems to explain the evolution of fiscal policy in Latin American countries between 1990 and 2006. The model predicts and empirical evidence confirms that where party systems are weakly nationalized on both scales, there are larger fiscal deficits and increasing spending because transaction costs associated with fiscal structure are higher. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to explain the differences in the strategies between African and Latin American countries towards the expansion of economic power of China in the two regions by comparing their domestic economic structure and political consideration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]