Latin American Development and Public Policy

This book analyses various important aspects of methodology and substance regarding economic, social, and political policy in Latin America directed toward achieving more effective, efficient, and equitable societal institutions. The chapters are authored by experts from within Latin America and also from Latin America research institutes elsewhere. The book combines practical policy significance with insightful causal and prescriptive generalizations. The emphasis is on the role of governmental decision-making and the important (but secondary) role of the marketplace, social groups, and engineering. Specific sets of chapters include those on economic policy, such as one on the crisis in the welfare state, and another on consensus-building in developing international economic communities. Social policy chapters emphasize dealing with problem of the poor, especially health care, but also other aspects of poverty and ethnic groups. The section on technology policy deals with developing electronics for export and internal consumption, with an emphasis on the role of government and technology as policy partners. The political policy section includes electoral reform, the spread of democracy, not Marxism, the legacy of authoritarianism, the role of co-participation, and the prosecution of human rights violations. The book ends with an analysis of the development of political science in Mexico and Latin America.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.