Models of Economic Liberalization Business, Workers, and Compensation in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal

This book aims to explain the variation in the models of economic liberalization across Ibero-America in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and the legacies they produced for the current organization of the political economies. Although the macroeconomics of effective market adjustment evolved in a similar way, the patterns of compensation delivered by neoliberal governments and the type of actors in business and the working class that benefited from them were remarkably different. Etchemendy argues that the most decisive factors that shape adjustment paths are the type of regime and the economic and organizational power with which business and labor emerged from the inward-oriented model. The analysis spans from the origins of state, business and labor industrial actors in the 1930s and 1940s to the politics of compensation under neoliberalism across the Ibero-American world, combined with extensive field work material on Spain, Argentina and Chile.

Part I. The Intellectual Terrain: 1. Overview: models of economic liberalization in ISI economies; 2. From state to society: neoliberal reform and a theory of compensation in ISI economies; Part II. The Political Economy of Business Adjustment: 3. Compensating business insiders: the origins of statist and corporatist models in Spain and Argentina; 4. Statist and corporatist models of business adjustment in Spain and Argentina: sectoral case studies; 5. Exceptions that prove the rule: variations within countries in models of business adjustment; Part III. The Political Economy of Labor Adjustment: 6. Compensating labor insiders: the origins of statist and corporatist models in Spain and Argentina; 7. Statist and corporatist models of labor adjustment in Spain and Argentina: sectoral case studies; Part IV. The Market Model: 8. The market path to economic liberalization: Chile in the comparative framework; Part V. Comparative Perspectives in Ibero-America: 9. Models of economic liberalization in Brazil, Portugal, Peru, and Mexico; 10. Conclusions: legacies for the liberalized economies and varieties of capitalism in Ibero-America.

Sebastián Etchemendy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Torcuato Di Tella University, Argentina. He holds a B.A. from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has published in the journals Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics and Society and Desarrollo Económico, as well as in edited volumes on Argentine and Latin American politics. He won the Fulbright Fellowship for graduate studies in the United States and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Dissertation Fellowship. His dissertation, on which this book is based, was nominated by the Department of Political Science at Berkeley for the Almond Prize for Best Dissertation at the American Political Science Association. In 2007, he served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.