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"This book is one of the first attempts to analyze how developing countries through the early twenty-first century have established systems of social protection and how these systems have been affected by the recent processes of globalization and democratization. The book focuses on Latin America, a pioneer in welfare state development in the developing world, to identify factors associated with the evolution of welfare state policies during the preglobalization period prior to 1979 and studies how globalization and democratization in the last thirty years have affected governments' fiscal commitment to social spending."--Jacket

A number of emerging markets have experienced substantial real exchange rate appreciationin recent years, generating concerns about competitiveness and prompting policymakers torespond with a combination of mitigating policies. This paper shows that fiscal policy can play a role in alleviating these pressures. Using a sample of 28 emerging market economies over 1983-2011, we estimate a dynamic model of the real exchange rate and find that a permanent fiscal adjustment may reduce appreciation pressures over the long term. Furthermore, the composition of public spending matters, with reductions

This study examines the effects of globalization, democratization, and partisanship on social spending in fourteen Latin American countries from 1973 to 1997, using a pooled time-series error-correction model. The authors examine three sets of issues. First, following debates in the literature on OECD countries, they want to know whether social spending has been encouraged or constrained by integration into global markets. Within this context, they examine the extent to which such outcomes might be influenced by two additional sets of domestic political and institutional factors discussed in work on developed countries: the electoral pressures of democratic institutions and whether or not popularly based governments are in power.The authors show that trade integration has a consistently negative effect on aggregate social spending and that this is compounded by openness to capital markets. This is the strongest and most robust finding in the study. Neither democratic nor popularly based governments consistently affect overall social spending. The authors then disaggregate spending into social security transfers and expenditures on health and education. They find that popularly based governments tend to protect social security transfers, which tend toflowdisproportionately to their unionized constituencies; but they have a negative impact on health and education spending. Conversely, a shift to democracy leads to increases in health and education spending, which reaches a larger segment of the population. The authors conclude by emphasizing the contrasting political log-ics of the different types of social spending.