Documents the wide range of inputs from non-governmental and other sectors to the Summit of the Americas II held in April 1998. Chronicles the contributions of civil society organizations to the planning process for the Summit, while evaluating the progress on implementation of Summit initiatives from Miami through Santiago. Discusses issues from free trade and economic integration, to corruption, drug trafficking, and the elimination of poverty and discrimination. The 64 contributions and eight letters reveal how the emerging architecture of cooperation has made this process the primary vehicle of inter-American relations.

Despite the large number of regional and global summits there is very little known about the functioning and impact of this particular type of diplomatic practice. While recognizing that the growing importance of summits is a universal phenomenon, this volume takes advantage of the richness of the Americas experiment to offer a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of contemporary summitry. The book addresses questions such as: How effective have summits been ? How have civil society and other non-state actors been involved in summits? How have summits impacted on the management of regional affairs? Filling a significant void in the literature, this volume offers an original contribution helping to understand how summitry has become a central feature of world politics. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of diplomacy, international organizations, and global/regional governance.

"The one source that sets reference collections on Latin American studies apart from all other geographic areas of the world.... The Handbook has provided scholars interested in Latin America with a bibliographical source of a quality unavailable to scholars in most other branches of area studies." —Latin American Research Review Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research under way in specialized areas. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest continuing reference work in the field. Lawrence Boudon, of the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, has been the editor since 2001, and Katherine D. McCann has been assistant editor since 2000. The subject categories for Volume 59 are as follows: Anthropology Economics Geography Government and Politics International Relations Sociology Electronic Resources for the Social Sciences

This report examines the precise nature of the required institutional reforms needed to achieve higher sustained rates of growth and to make a dent in poverty reduction and provides a framework for their design and implementation. The more modest objective is to examine how the concepts of the new institutional economics are useful for analyzing and designing institutions and to evaluate how political economy concepts can be used to develop strategies for implementing institutional reforms. Employing some of these concepts, the report demonstrates that sound institutional reform can be technically and politically viable in the following key sectors: banking; capital markets and legal institutions; educational institutions; judicial reforms; and public administration.