Suchergebnisse

In 1995, Canada came the closest it has ever been in its history to breaking apart. With Quebec nationalism on the rise after a failed decade of attempted constitutional reform in the 1980s, the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois and Parti Québécois political parties sought to take Quebec out of the Canadian federation by hosting a referendum asking the infamous question: "Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?" In response, the federal government of Canada organized against the nationalist Yes Campaign, hoping to prevent a Québécois bid for independence. This article outlines the four main strategies the federal government used to keep Quebec within the federation: delegitimizing the question posed by the Parti Québécois on the referendum, turning to the United States for support on Canadian unity, promising distinct society and constitutional reforms for Quebec, and hosting an energetic Unity Rally in Montreal. With these four strategies, the federal government of Canada would tried its best to organize against Quebec's independence and keep Canada whole.

This paper examines the new Bolivian Constitution (NBC), promulgated in February 2009, from the viewpoint of the new economic institutionalism. The NBC fixes the rules conducive to the establishment of a plural economic organization. These rules are eclectic, yet they convey a state-led development model. A significant extension of the state-owned enterprises is a prominent feature. Also, the NBC assigns an important place to communitarian (or communal) forms of organization, although their boundaries are ill defined. The NBC also purveys the view of development based primarily on the exploitation and industrialization of Bolivia's natural resources. However, the exploitation has to be compatible with the preservation of the environment and it has to take into account the particular interests of the indigenous peoples in whose territory are the resources, in line with the recovery of the ethnic identities that occupies a centerplace in the NBC. The traditional rights of republican institutions are recognized in the NBC but they leave the front stage to transit to a second level of importance. In particular, several easements are imposed to the right to private property. Moreover the NBC opens vulnerabilities to private property rights and makes them more contestable than in the previous constitutions. Prima facie, the weakening of the institutions of private property will harm the long-term growth prospects of Bolivia's economy. The NBC contains many disincentives to the accumulation of physical and human capital, as well as of technical progress and the development of markets. From a political viewpoint, the NBC is the de jure arrangement of the de facto new distribution of political power among social classes that has surged in Bolivia since early 2006. It is too early to conclude on the stability of this new political distribution. But even so, we can foresee that the long-term consequences of today's institutions, unfriendly to markets, will be very important.

In late 1982 Bolivia returned to democracy, after a long period of mostly military governments, during whose tenure real wages had declined considerably. The first democratic government, presided by Dr. Hernán Siles Suazo inherited of the military governmets a much deteriorated economy, marked by the external debt crisis. Siles Zuazo found very difficult to mediate between macroeconomic adjustment and the demands of his electorate. The government's defensive populism was unable to cope with the mounting social pressures that affected the fiscal deficits which were financed printing money. The resulting inflation that culminated in hyperinflation was moreover accompanied by food shortages and black markets. GDP fell substantially. The Central Confederation of Workers disdained the fiscal and balance of payments constraints and its wage race was a major culprit of the economic disaster. The hyperinflation was stopped with a drastic and orthodox program of stabilization that a side result politically weakened organized labor.

Populist experiments are recurrent in Latin America. One of the most conspicuous cases is that of Bolivia in the 21th century under the government of Evo Morales and his Movement to Socialism (MAS). A major distinctive feature of this populism is the incorporation of the ethnic and linguistic demands of the large indigenous population. The populism of this century, in common with previous experiences, prioritizes the redistribution of income and wealth, based on the central role of the state and nationalism. Economic policies are aimed at short-term political gains and ignoring long term consequences. However, the aggression to markets, very clear in the policy of nationalizations, has been more important than fiscal and monetary expansion. Also, because of the benign international environment, the MAS government has not had to face fiscal or balance of payments constraints.

En este trabajo se examina las nuevas condiciones para las relaciones económicas internacionales de Bolivia que ha creado el gobierno del Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). La visión más común en los gobiernos anteriores a los del MAS era que si Bolivia ha de desarrollarse, necesitaba participar ampliamente en el comercio internacional y atraer, al mismo tiempo, flujos de capital externo para financiar las inversiones requeridas para su crecimiento. Se veía a la participación en la globalización como una condición necesaria mas, obviamente, no suficiente para el crecimiento y el desarrollo. La posición del gobierno del MAS difiere en muchos aspectos de la concepción anterior y de las visiones de los gobiernos previos. Ella está claramente más volcada al interior, con un papel más importante para el estado y en pos de una mayor industrialización de los recursos naturales del país, siguiendo modelos de mediados del siglo pasado. Las preguntas que hay que responder son: ¿cuál es el espacio de maniobra del gobierno del MAS dadas las tendencias de los principales socios comerciales de Bolivia y de las fuentes internacionales de financiamiento? ¿Cuán bien preparada está la economía boliviana para actuar bajo otras reglas de juego? ¿Qué consecuencias puede tener el retorno de políticas arcaicas? ; The "deliberative development" approach to policy reform has gained popularity in both academic and policy circles without a clear understanding of the requirements for its success. Based on a reading of the deliberative democracy literature, we detail those requirements, finding them to be quite restrictive. We then examine Bolivia's 2000 National Dialogue, a national deliberation on development policy, and find—not surprisingly—that these requirements were generally missing. More importantly, we demonstrate that the lack of these requirements is not benign: the institutional characteristics of the Dialogue had direct effects, and the Dialogue continues to affect Bolivia's politics in debatable ways. The late 1990s and early part of this decade witnessed what appeared to be a major change in the approach of international development institutions to policy reform. The most important evidence of this change was the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) initiative of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This initiative, which arose in 1999 in the context of updating the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries' (HIPC) Initiative, required countries to prepare a PRSP prior to receiving debt relief (see International Monetary Fund and International Development Association, 1999). Each country's PRSP was to outline an overall strategy to reduce poverty, including structural reforms such as trade and privatization as well as specific anti-poverty programs. These PRSPs are now required to receive any World Bank or IMF concessional assistance. What made the PRSP initiative particularly innovative and noteworthy was that the Bank and Fund required that the strategy be developed in a "participatory" way. That is, the PRSP needed to be based on some sort of consultative process by which the government solicited input from various societal groups—including local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, and unions—and then incorporated those preferences in the policy. This approach to government policymaking seemed to go directly against a line of academic work on economic reform that had been influential in these institutions for years (e.g. Sturzenneger and Tommasi, 1998), arguing that there was an inverse relationship between the success of economic reform and the amount of participation of society in making policies. Having criticized this old approach for years, most NGOs and developing country governments supported the new direction taken by the World Bank and IMF. In fact, few critics of the approach (e.g. Stewart and Wang, 2003) have critiqued the idea of participation, most instead focusing their critiques on the poor "extent" and "quality" of participation. In one of the benchmark articles supporting this "deliberative" approach to policy reform, Peter Evans (2004) notes that such an approach to policymaking is supported by work by the economists Amartya Sen (1999) and Dani Rodrik (2000), who argue that participation and public deliberation are means to better policies. Evans writes, "If it were possible to implant this sort of deliberative process in political units large enough to impact developmental trajectories—say, the provincial or municipal level—we would have something that could be called 'deliberative development'" (2004: 37). Discussing examples from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Kerala, India, Evans goes on to argue that this type of development is not only desirable, but attainable. Despite its increasing popularity in the academic and policy worlds, we still know little about what is needed for the deliberative development approach to be successful. While it may be true that political processes in Porto Alegre, Kerala, and elsewhere have exhibited deliberative aspects as well as positive development outcomes, the particular details of how the former relates to the latter remain murky. Are deliberative processes appropriate for all development decisions? Are there particular characteristics of the society that need to be present in order for deliberation to work well? Are there particular characteristics of the deliberative institutions that need to be present? Can there be any negative effects if deliberation is not done well? If the deliberative development approach is to be considered a viable and superior policymaking alternative, these questions must be answered.

In the 1980s a large number of Latin American countries reverted from military dictatorships to civilian democracies. In most cases the new democratic governments inherited an extremely precarious economic situation, which left little room to manoeuvre. This book analyzes the special problems that governments face in the formulation and implementation of economic policy after the restoration of democracy. In each of six cases - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay - an analysis is made of the difficulties encountered and the performance of the democratic governments.

By any standard, Bolivia's economic crisis in the 1980's has been extraordinary. Like its neighbors. Bolivia suffered from major external shocks, but the extent of economic collapse in the face of these shocks (including a hyperinflation during 1984-85) suggests that internal factors as well as external shocks have been critical to Bolivia's poor economic performance. One major theme of our work is that the recent economic crisis in Bolivia is a reflection of political and economic conflicts in Bolivian society that have undermined the development process throughout this century. While major reforms have been begun by the present government, many of the deepest problems in Bolivian society that contributed to the crisis remain unresolved.