"We Have a Consensus": Explaining Political Support for Market Reforms in Latin America

Free trade agreements and regional alliances: support from Latin American legislators

“…Because convergence between government and opposition might confirm the very existence of consensus (Mújica and Sánchez-Cuenca 2006;Miller and Stecker 2008), here we focus on attitudes of government and opposition deputies to explore the degrees of consensus on that dimension. This approach is not new when analyzing, for instance, market reforms in the region (Armijo and Faucher 2002). Absence of statistical significance means government/opposition consensus, and presence means dissension.…”

Is World Bank “Good Governance” Good for the Poor? Central American Experiences

“…Scholars widely credit neoliberal reforms with helping to control Latin America's high rates of inflation (Armijo and Faucher 2002;Oxhorn 2009). The links between market-oriented reforms and economic growth 3) Walton (2004:165), a World Bank researcher, notes that neoliberalism in its narrow usage "refers to a shift in a subset of policies to a greater reliance on markets; and, a broader usage, that implies a wholesale change in the relationship between the state and society, with a more vigorous embrace of the market being part of a generalized withdrawal of state provisioning and action."…”

“…20) As Cohen and Centeno's (2006) statistical analysis of market liberalization policies concludes, Latin American "countries have not experienced any appreciable improvement in growth, cross-national equality, employment, or national debt loads, although there is some evidence of improved price stability near the end of the 1990s." As discussed earlier, however, IFI-promoted structural adjustment programs are widely credited with helping reduce the region's high rates of inflation, an outcome which garnered a degree of popular support (Armijo and Faucher 2002;Hagopian and Mainwaring 2005). to which market reform policies linked to good governance perpetuate or intensify such unequal access to resources, they likely undermine the capacity of social movements of the poor to hold state officials accountable in practice.…”

Anti‐American Resistance in Latin America: An Issue of Sovereignty, Militarization, and Neoliberalism

“…This paper sought to respond to the debt crisis experienced in Latin America and proposed ‘a desirable set of economic policy reforms’ that would serve Washington’s interest in the region (Williamson 2002, 1). The core attributes of the proposed orientation were “fiscal reform, adoption of an export‐oriented bias, reduction of subsidies to strategic and basic goods, privatization of state enterprises and social security, and deregulation of foreign investment” (Armijo and Faucher 2002, 2). This set of policies became the foundation of the neoliberal project, shifting economic arrangements from import substitution industrialization (ISI) toward market‐oriented reform (Amann and Baer 2002; Armijo and Faucher 2002; Bigliaser and DeRouen 2004).…”