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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.In Routes to Reform, Ben Ross Schneider examines education policy throughout Latin America to show that reforms to improve learning--especially making teacher careers more meritocratic and less political--are possible. He contends that the first bottom-up route to reform is electoral. The second route was more top-down and technocratic, with little support from electorates or civil society. By framing education policy in a much broader comparative perspective, Schneider demonstrates that contrary to much established theory, reform outcomes in Latin America depended less on institutions and broad coalitions, but rather--due to the emptiness of the education policy space--on more micro factors like civil society organizations, teacher unions, policy networks, and technocrats.

New Order and Progress offers an extensive examination of the political economy of Brazil. The distinctive perspective of the 11 chapters is historical, comparative, and theoretical. Some of the major topics covered include inequality, the new middle class, state capitalism, the resource curse, protest movements, and the frayed social contract.

Schneider's book is the first systematically comparative and historical analysis of the incorporation of business into politics in Latin America. It examines business organizing and political activity over the last century, considering why business ended up better organized in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico than in Argentina and Brazil

Annotation Brazil was one of the most successful examples of state-led industrialization in the post-1945 era. Yet, on the surface, the Brazilian bureaucracy appears highly fragmented, personalized, and ad-hoc. Ben Ross Schneider looks behind this façade to explain how the Brazilian bureaucracy contributes to industrialization by analyzing career patterns and appointments which structure incentives and power more than formal organizations or institutions. Politics and personalism, of the right sort, Schneider argues, can in fact enhance policy effectiveness and state capacity

The record of successful developmental states in East Asia and the partial successes of developmental states in Latin America suggest several common preconditions for effective state intervention including a Weberian bureaucracy, monitoring of implementation, reciprocity (subsidies in exchange for performance), and collaborative relations between government and business. Although Brazil failed to develop the high technology manufacturing industry and exports that have fueled sustained growth in East Asia, its developmental state had a number of important, and often neglected, successes, especially in steel, automobiles, mining, ethanol, and aircraft manufacturing. Where Brazil's developmental state was less successful was in promoting sectors like information technology and nuclear energy, as well as overall social and regional equality. In addition, some isolated initiatives by state governments were also effective in promoting particular local segments of industry and agriculture. Comparisons with East Asia, highlight the central role of state enterprises in Brazil that in effect internalized monitoring and reciprocity and bypassed collaboration between business and government (that was overall rarer in Brazil).

O trabalho ressalta a relação entre os futuros servidores governamentais com o setor privado, enfocando as interfaces construídas, por um lado, pelas perspectivas funcionais nas carreiras do setor público e, por outro, pelas influências do poder econômico exercidas através do empresariado. Nesse sentido, dados sobre as experiências norte-americana, francesa, japonesa, mexicana e brasileira são apresentados.

The record of successful developmental states in East Asia and the partial successes of developmental states in Latin America suggest several common preconditions for effective state intervention including a Weberian bureaucracy, monitoring of implementation, reciprocity (subsidies in exchange for performance), and collaborative relations between government and business. Although Brazil failed to develop the high technology manufacturing industry and exports that have fueled sustained growth in East Asia, its developmental state had a number of important, and often neglected, successes, especially in steel, automobiles, mining, ethanol, and aircraft manufacturing. Where Brazil's developmental state was less successful was in promoting sectors like information technology and nuclear energy, as well as overall social and regional equality. In addition, some isolated initiatives by state governments were also effective in promoting particular local segments of industry and agriculture. Comparisons with East Asia, highlight the central role of state enterprises in Brazil that in effect internalized monitoring and reciprocity and bypassed collaboration between business and government (that was overall rarer in Brazil).

Luna, Murillo, and Schrank (LMS) do our field a very valuable service by raising questions on the state of research on the political economy in Latin America and where it should be going. They cover a lot of ground in a short space, leaving a smorgasbord of issues to mull over, question, or endorse. To my mind, some of the most promising critiques in the memo are that there are gaps in the field and that those gaps are due in part to methodological fashion. Yet the discussion of gaps in LMS is somewhat ungrounded and underspecified. Closing the essay with a call for more research on democracy, development, state formation, inequality, and international linkages seems to miss the fact that most recent research is actually related to these five topics. Many readers probably would react by saying to themselves that they have been conducting some research in one or more of these areas.

What makes for effective cooperation between government and business in industrial policy? Core research questions on the institutional design of arrangements for business-government interactions focus on three main functions: i) maximizing the benefits of dialogue and information exchange; ii) motivating participation through authoritative allocation; and iii) minimizing unproductive rent seeking. Countries with more experiences of public-private collaboration (PPC) tend to have more pragmatic governments and better organized and informally networked private sectors. Effective cooperation also depends on the macro context, in particular the nature of the political system and the alternative avenues it provides for business politicking, especially through parties, networks and appointments, the media, and campaign finance. Lastly, the structure and strategies of big domestic businesses-mostly diversified, family-owned business groups-affects their preferences and interest in collaborating in industrial policy.