Books

Trust is the most pressing and yet least discussed problem confronting Latin America and the Caribbean. Whether in others, in government, or in firms, trust is lower in the region than anywhere else in the world. The economic and political consequences of mistrust ripple through society. It suppresses growth and innovation: investment, entrepreneurship, and employment all flourish when firms and government, workers and employers, banks and borrowers, and consumers and producers trust each other. Trust inside private and public sector organizations is essential for collaboration and innovation. Mistrust distorts democratic decision-making. It keeps citizens from demanding better public services and infrastructure, from joining with others to control corruption, and from making the collective sacrifices that leave everyone better off. The good news is that governments can increase citizen trust with clearer promises of what citizens can expect from them, public sector reforms that enable them to keep their promises, and institutional reforms that strengthen the commitments that citizens make to each other. This book guides decision-makers as they incorporate trust and social cohesion into the comprehensive reforms needed to address the region’s most pernicious challenges.

Over the past 30 years, democratic freedoms and competitive electoral processes have taken hold as never before in Latin America. How Democracy Works takes a detailed look, from an institutional perspective, at each of the main actors on the policymaking stage in Latin America, emphasizing the extent to which institutions facilitate or hinder intertemporal political cooperation and compromise. It analyzes official political actors and arenas, as well as a number of societal actors, and explores the (formal) roles of these players, their incentives, capabilities, and the way in which they actually engage in the policymaking game. The conclusion: these political institutions and actors matter for policymaking in Latin America and leave an indelible imprint on the policy process and the resulting policies.

What determines the capacity of countries to design, approve and implement effective public policies? To address this question, this book builds on the results of case studies of political institutions, policymaking processes, and policy outcomes in eight Latin American countries. The result is a volume that benefits from both micro detail on the intricacies of policymaking in individual countries and a broad cross-country interdisciplinary analysis of policymaking processes in the region.

¿Qué determina la capacidad de los países para diseñar, aprobar e implementar políticas públicas efectivas? Para abordar esta pregunta, este libro analiza el proceso de formulación de políticas en ocho países latinoamericanos. Este análisis sistemático se concentra en estudiar tanto las instituciones políticas, y el funcionamiento de las instituciones y organizaciones políticas, como los resultados de las políticas. El resultado es un texto que se beneficia tanto de un detallado análisis sobre las complejidades del proceso de formulación de políticas en cada país por separado, como de un análisis interdisciplinario y comparativo de los procesos de formulación de políticas en la región.

This book combines an institutional political economy approach to policy making with social network analysis of social policy formulation processes. Based on extensive interviews with governmental and nongovernmental actors, the case studies of social policy formulation in Argentina, The Bahamas, Bolivia, and Trinidad and Tobago show that while societal actors are central in the networks in South American countries, government officials are the main participants in the Caribbean countries. The comparative analysis of the networks of ideas, information, economic resources, and political power across these cases indicates that differences in the types of bureaucratic systems and governance structures may explain the diversity of actors with decision power and the resources used to influence social policy formulation across the region. These analytical and methodological contributions-combined with specific examples of policies and programs-will help to enhance the efficiency, efficacy, and sustainability of public policies in the social arena.

http://www.iadb.org/es/investigacion-y-datos/detalles-de-publicacion,3169.html?pub_id=IDB%2DBK%2D146

Por qué algunos programas sociales tienen éxito y otros no? Porque las políticas públicas no se diseñan y ejecutan en el vacío: son parte fundamental del juego político. Con este libro se intenta ayudar a entender cómo funciona el proceso decisorio en la realidad analizándolo con un nuevo lente metodológico en el que se combinan el análisis de redes sociales y el de economía política. Se emplean estos instrumentos para mostrar cómo pueden ser aplicados para examinar casos concretos de programas sociales en la región. Se espera que los hallazgos de esta investigación contribuyan a entender los resultados de las políticas públicas, así como a un mejor diseño operativo y a una ejecución más eficiente de los programas sociales en América Latina.

This book analyzes the budget process in ten Latin American countries over approximately the last 25 years, stressing the role of the actors that participate in the process, their incentives, and the rules that bind their interaction. By doing so, it situates the budget process as one of the core policymaking arenas, where bargaining takes place not only for specific public goods, but also for a relevant share of the public policies of a country. Who Decides the Budget? goes a long way towards explaining how economies, institutions, and politics interact to produce budget outcomes in Latin America, a region in which informality dominates public governance.

http://www.iadb.org/en/research-and-data/publication-details,3169.html?pub_id=B-640

El sistema político colombiano se transformó desde la Constitución de 1991. En la actualidad es más participativo, más representativo y más descentralizado. Pero la transformación del sistema político produjo también una fragmentación de los poderes de decisión lo que, combinado con la fragmentación del poder económico, multiplicó el número de actores involucrados en las decisiones de política económica y redujo las posibilidades de coordinación de las políticas. Estas consecuencias imprevistas de la Constitución de 1991 permiten entender por qué el desempeño económico es menos satisfactorio y menos destacado en el concierto latinoamericano que antes de 1991.