The shift from state-led import-substitution industrialization to more market-oriented economic models often has the result of shrinking and demobilizing the labor movement. Yet, evidence from Argentina suggests that a subsequent resurgence of even a downsized labor movement may occur and furthermore that a type of “segmented neocorporatism” may be established in the new economic context. We argue that the establishment of this new form of interest intermediation is driven by economic and political factors that are both immediate and longer term. In addition to the short-term condition of the labor market and the political strategy of the government in power, of longer-term importance are structural and institutional conditions that derive from the earlier process of market reform, specifically the nature of sectoral shifts in the economy and the degree of labor law deregulation affecting the “associational power” of unions.
It is frequently argued that the key to "successful" economic liberalization is to marginalize interest groups that profit from existing regulatory regimes. This paper contends that some established interests can craft public policies to protect their rents in the new market setting. The state may shape the interests of social actors and create proreform copstituencies out of old populist and interventionist groups. In Argentina, this coalition building was achieved by constructing reform policies that granted rents in new markets to business and organized labor and by deliberately avoiding unilateral deregulation in sectors where reform would hurt traditionally powerful actors. This argument is developed through a comparative analysis of policy reform in the labor market institutions and protected industrial sectors, areas where the costs of deregulation are said to be unavoidable for the established actors.ince the beginning of the 1990s, Argentina has undergone one of the LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 43: 3 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 43: 3
Conventional wisdom holds that liberal economic policy and a hasty integration into the European Union is the central feature of Spain's successful adaptation to the globalization wave. This study argues that a set of illiberal and protectionist policies are crucial to understanding the Spanish transformation. Spain's reorganization of its economy displayed three broad components: the revamping of industrial sectors from above; the targeted protection granted to the energy, banking, and telecommunications sectors; and a defined strategy of privatization that prevented any major international player from taking part in a given business. The author argues that this statist model of market transition in Spain was decisively shaped by two concrete features of the Spanish political economy as it unfolded under the import substitution industrialization model: the organizational and economic weakness of the domestic industrial bourgeoisie and the comparatively entrenched position of financial capital and its energy-controlled companies.
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