Leading governments undertook extraordinary measures to offset the 2008 economic crisis, shoring up financial institutions, stimulating demand to reverse recession, and rebalancing budgets to alleviate sovereign debt. While productive in and of themselves, these solutions were effective because they were coordinated internationally and were matched with sweeping global financial reforms. Unfortunately, coordination has weakened after these initial steps, indicating one of the crisis's adverse effects will be a significant reduction in development cooperation. Urging advanced nations to improve their support for development, the contributors to this volume revisit the causes of the 2008 collapse and the ongoing effects of recession on global and developing economies. They reevaluate the international response to crisis and suggest more effective approaches to development cooperation. Experts on international aid join together to redesign the cooperation system and its governance, so it can accept new actors and better achieve the Millennial Development Goals of 2015 within the context of severe global crisis. In their introduction, José Antonio Alonso and José Antonio Ocampo summarize different chapters and the implications of their analyses, concluding with a frank assessment of global economic imbalance and the ability of increased cooperation to rectify these inequalities.

Written by a diverse group of scholars and practitioners from Latin America, the US and Europe and taking into consideration the recent global financial crisis,the book offers a multifaceted insight into the expectations as well as the possible threats related to Latin America's incorporation into the sphere of global interconnectedness.

In the world of academic scholarship, there exists a pressing problem that has long confounded researchers and scholars alike. The issue at hand is the glaring gap in our understanding of political asymmetry—an elusive concept that holds the key to deciphering how institutions evolve and influence normative constructs within contemporary governance structures. Despite its undeniable relevance, political asymmetry has remained a neglected subject in social science discourse. This omission hampers our capacity to explore the intricate interplay between cultural diversity, normative representations, and political dynamics. As such, a critical void persists in comprehending the complex mechanisms that underpin governance practices in our ever-evolving global landscape. Cognitive Governance and the Historical Distortion of the Norm of Modern Development: A Theory of Political Asymmetry offers an illuminating solution to this enduring problem. This pioneering work presents a comprehensive and meticulously crafted exploration of the concept of political asymmetry, providing both a theoretical taxonomy and an empirical roadmap for scholars eager to delve into uncharted territory. By bridging this knowledge gap, the book equips researchers with the tools needed to redefine how political asymmetry is not only understood but also applied in rigorous social science research. It marks a transformative shift in our approach to political science, enabling us to navigate the labyrinth of contemporary governance structures with newfound clarity.

Business diplomacy involves developing strategies for long-term, positive relationship building with governments, local communities, and interest groups, aiming to establish and sustain legitimacy and to mitigate the risks arising from all non-commercial or exogenous factors in the global business environment.

It has been over twenty years since the Brazilian Sistema Único de Saúde (Unified Health System or SUS) was formally established by the 1988 Constitution. The impetus for the SUS came in part from rising costs and a crisis in the social security system that preceded the reforms, but also from a broad-based political movement calling for democratization and improved social rights. Building on reforms that started in the 1980s, the SUS was based on three overarching principles: (i) universal access to health services, with health defined as a citizen’s right and an obligation of the state; (ii) equality of access to health care; and (iii) integrality (comprehensiveness) and continuity of care; along with several other guiding ideas, including decentralization, increased participation, and evidence-based prioritization. The SUS reform established health a fundamental right and duty of the state, and started a process of fundamentally transforming Brazil’s health system to achieve this goal. So, what has been achieved since the SUS was established? And what challenges remain in achieving the goals that were established in 1988? These questions are the focus of this report. Specifically, it seeks to assess whether the SUS reforms have managed to transform the health system as envisaged more than 20 years ago, and whether the reforms have led to improved outcomes in terms of access to services, financial protection, and health status. Any effort to assess the performance of a health system runs into a host of challenges concerning the definition of boundaries of the “health system”, the outcomes that the assessment should focus on, data sources and quality, and the role of policies and reforms in understanding how the performance of the health system has changed over time. Building on an extensive literature on health system assessment, this report is based on a simple framework that specifies a set of health system “building blocks”, which affect a number of intermediate outcomes such as access, quality and efficiency, which, in turn, contribute to final outcomes, including health status, financial protection, and satisfaction. Based on this framework, the report starts by looking at how key building blocks of Brazil’s health system have changed over time and then moves on to review performance in terms of intermediate and final outcomes.

The publication of the sixty-first edition of the Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean, corresponding to 2008-2009, comes at a critical point in the economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean region. A growth phase that the region's recent history cannot equal in nature and duration has come to an end and output is contracting. The first part of this edition looks at the channels through which the crisis is affecting the economies of the region and its impact on variables such as economic growth, employment and external-sector indicators. It also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the countries and concludes with a discussion of the outlook for the second half of the year. The second part discusses policies for creating quality jobs, including challenges and opportunities for labor institutions and labor markets, labor-market policies for youth and women. This CD-ROM also contains the electronic versions of the printed publication. The statistical information presented in this publication reflects the data available up to 30 June 2009