In Latin America during the 1980s, the widely accepted model of economic development collapsed, triggering profound changes in relations among the state, civil society, and the market. This volume advocates a fundamental rethinking of central issues in Latin American political economy.

Latin America suffered a profound state crisis in the 1980s, which prompted not only the wave of macroeconomic and deregulation reforms known as the Washington Consensus, but also a wide variety of institutional or 'second generation' reforms. 'The State of State Reform in Latin America' reviews and assesses the outcomes of these less studied institutional reforms. This book examines four major areas of institutional reform: a. political institutions and the state organization; b. fiscal institutions, such as budget, tax and decentralization institutions; c. public institutions in charge of sectoral economic policies (financial, industrial, and infrastructure); and d. social sector institutions (pensions, social protection, and education). In each of these areas, the authors summarize the reform objectives, describe and measure their scope, assess the main outcomes, and identify the obstacles for implementation, especially those of an institutional nature.

The Marxist Theory of Dependency (TMD) managed to articulate the insertion of peripheral societies into the international market with the capital accumulation processes of each country. It has become an essential theory for the understanding of our societies. Since Ruy Mauro Marini laid out its foundations, many transformations have occurred in global capitalism and in our societies, leaving us the challenge of updating it against a more complex context. The real test of theory is its adequacy as an instrument of understanding contemporary reality. The TMD has been enriched and renewed from this work of Carlos Eduardo Martins. It considers capitalism from the perspective of anti-capitalism, dependence from the standpoint of emancipation and reality through a vision for its revolutionary transformation. Emir Sader - CLACSO General Secretary (2006-2012) This book is a revised edition of a work first published in 2011 as Globalização, dependência e neoliberalismo na América Latina by Boitempo Editorial, São Paulo, Brazil. La teoría marxista de la dependencia (TMD) logró articular la inserción de las sociedades periféricas en el mercado internacional con los procesos de acumulación de capital de cada país. Se ha convertido en una teoría esencial para la comprensión de nuestras sociedades. Desde que Ruy Mauro Marini expuso sus fundamentos, muchas transformaciones ocurrieron en el capitalismo global y en nuestras sociedades, poniendo el desafío de actualización en condiciones más complejas La prueba real de la teoría es su adecuación como instrumento de comprensión de la realidad contemporánea. La TMD sale enriquecida y renovada de esta obra de Carlos Eduardo Martins dedicada a pensar el capitalismo bajo la perspectiva del anticapitalismo, la dependencia en la óptica de la emancipación y la realidad en la perspectiva de su transformación revolucionaria. Emir Sader - Secretario General CLACSO (2006-2012)

Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource redistribution. Tracing the movement along these dimensions since the 1990s, the editors argue that the endurance of democratic politics, combined with longstanding social inequalities, create the impetus for inclusionary reforms. Diverse chapters explore how factors such as the role of partisanship and electoral clientelism, constitutional design, state capacity, social protest, populism, commodity rents, international diffusion, and historical legacies encouraged or inhibited inclusionary reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring original empirical evidence and a strong theoretical framework, the book considers cross-national variation, delves into the surprising paradoxes of inclusion, and identifies the obstacles hindering further fundamental change.

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history.

Neoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique. Recognizing the heterogeneities within and between both neoliberal theory and practice, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism looks to distinguish between the two as well as to theorize their relationship. By examining the views of state, democracy, science, and politics in the work of six major figures—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan—it offers the first comprehensive account of the varieties of neoliberal political thought. Ordoliberal perspectives, in particular, emerge in a new light. Turning from abstract to concrete, the book also interprets recent neoliberal reforms of the European Union to offer a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism more generally. The latest economic crises hardly brought the neoliberal era to an end. Instead, as Thomas Biebricher shows, we are witnessing an authoritarian liberalism whose reign has only just begun.

Neoliberalism has been at the centre of enormous controversy since its first appearance in Latin America in the early 1970s. Even neoliberalism’s strongest supporters concede that it has not lived up to its promises and that growth, poverty, and inequality all have performed considerably worse than hoped. This brief text offers an unbiased reflection on the neoliberal debate in Latin America and the institutional puzzle that underlies the region’s difficulties with democratization and development. In addition to providing an overview of this key element of the Latin American political economy, Peter Kingstone also advances an important but under-explored argument about political institutions. Kingstone offers a unique contribution by mapping out the problem of how to understand institutions, why they are created, and why Latin American ones function the way they do.