This chapter focuses on John M. Hunter, the thirty-nine-year-old Illinois native who spoke as director of Colombia's first economic research center and addressed readers of one of Colombia's premier journals of economic research, the Revista del Banco de la República. It also talks about economics in Latin America. During the years after 1945, Colombian universities established freestanding economics programs where none had existed before. There had been men called economists in Colombia for decades; they were brilliant lawyers, engineers, businessmen, and politicians who made national economic policy and taught occasional courses in political economy on the side. But the crisis of the 1930s had inspired a new regard for economic expertise as a specialized form of knowledge, and Colombians set out to create a new kind of economist to steer the state. The invention of economics as an independent discipline, a nineteenth-century process in the United States and much of Europe, was thus a twentieth-century phenomenon in Latin America, born of new visions of national development and spearheaded by renowned men in business and government.
Economists broadly agree on many key economic policy issues, but economics as a discipline has provided much less guidance on why and how economic policy reform occurs and how to develop institutional mechanisms that enable governments to adopt “good” economic policy. Political scientists are adept at identifying coalitions, constituencies, institutions, and interest groups, but they less commonly examine the implications for economic policy. Thus, work at the intersection between economics and politics—of why and how policy reform takes place—remains relatively unexplored territory. This is especially so in developing countries where political processes are more personalistic, institutions often less well established, outcomes more fluid, and the detailed case study literature on economic policy making still in its infancy. This paper provides an analytical survey of economic policy reform in Southeast Asia. It ranges across the major policy U-turns and the incremental reforms, with special reference to macroeconomic management and trade policy. On the basis of several case studies and set against the broader international literature, we advance nine conclusions on the political economy of reform.
Israel’s political economy has been transformed since the 1980s from a developmental to a neoliberal model. This chapter describes and explains this transformation, emphasizing the unevenness and incompleteness of liberalization and its impact on socioeconomic inequality. Adopting a historical-institutionalist perspective to explain both the rise of Israeli neoliberalism and its unevenness, the chapter argues that liberalization was led by economic technocrats in state agencies, who were guided by liberal economic ideas and simultaneously pursuing their interest in greater authority and autonomy. The technocrats were empowered by re-engineering economic policy institutions and cooperating with other political actors. However, their ability to fulfill the goal of technocratic management of a competition-driven economy was limited by the continuing power of some sectors of both business and labor and the continuing vibrancy of the state’s national and military projects. The conclusion discusses recent challenges to neoliberalism in Israel as a result of public discontent and conflict between state actors.
REVIEW OF THE BOOK “CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ECONOMY AS A THEORETICAL BASIS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIETY. IN TWO BOOKS. THE BOOK II. CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ECONOMY AS A METHODOLOGICAL PARADIGM OF THE ECONOMIC POLICY OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE GLOBALISED SOCIETY: A MONOGRAPH. КYIV: KNEU, 2020. 251 P.”(AUTHORS: YU. ZAITSEV, DOCTOR OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES, PROFESSOR, O. MOSKALENKO, DOCTOR OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES, PROFESSOR)