Bolivia’s ambitious development plans face challenges

Significance The strategy, which has attracted criticism from opponents as being overly statist, is based largely on the policy orientation adopted by the Morales administrations between 2006 and 2019. Broadly, it seeks to promote economic diversification and import substitution under the aegis of an interventionist state. Impacts Import substitution will face problems arising from the scale of contraband shipped through neighbouring countries. Most of Bolivia’s main exports are capital intensive, providing only limited employment spin-offs. Fiscal constraints and lower reserves may limit the resources available for public investment.

The new Zambian president faces long-term challenges

Significance Hichilema's surprise win came despite extensive voter suppression and intimidation attributed to former President Edgar Lungu and the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) against supporters of Hichilema’s United Party for National Development (UPND). Impacts The broad scope of Hichilema’s reform programme will pose difficulties of prioritisation, particularly within current fiscal constraints. Higher copper prices may mitigate some of the social costs associated with debt restructuring and spending cuts. The cancellation of a meeting between President Joe Biden and Hichilema over LGBT rights concerns may complicate relations with Washington.

Brazil infrastructure investments will fall far short

Significance Public investment in Brazilian infrastructure has declined in recent years, given the government’s fiscal constraints. President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration favours privatisations and concession plans, but low investment levels have generated fragilities that may affect both short- and long-term competitiveness. Impacts Water shortages will cause energy price increases due to the use of thermal power plants and energy imports. Bolsonaro’s continued criticism of China will raise doubts about forthcoming 5G auctions. Lack of public infrastructure investment will make infrastructure projects less attractive to private investors.

Tolerable Suboptimization: Racial Consequences of Defunding Public Universities

We argue that the public defunding of public higher education and turn to private revenue streams—for example, non-resident tuition, grants, philanthropy, and corporate sponsorship—generates organizational racial resource disparities. We draw on a year-long qualitative case study of a University of California campus with a majority Latinx and low-income student body, including ethnographic observations and interviews with administrators, staff, and students, to argue that these disparities may impede majority-marginalized universities’ abilities to serve their student body. Our data demonstrate how limited organizational resources impact the provision of academic advising, mental health, and cultural programming for racially marginalized students. We articulate a racial neoliberal cycle of resource allocation: Colorblind constructs of “merit” lead to racial segregation and generate racialized organizational hierarchies that result in unequal organizational access to private resources. University leadership at resourced-starved majoritymarginalized universities may respond to fiscal constraints by accepting and normalizing suboptimal support for students—what we refer to as “tolerable suboptimization.” Tolerable suboptimization may also be unevenly applied within universities, such that supports accessed or needed by marginalized students are the most impacted. As a consequence, institutional racism can take on the appearance of financial necessity.

Demographic policies for large families in Greece: an opinion survey and implications for the social administration

Opinion surveys as a tool for policy formation and effectiveness testing in the area of demographic / family policies is rather neglected, although it may reveal significant perceived effectiveness and preference rankings by the recipients of these policies, giving a strong indication of what works best for families who are thinking of or have already been accredited the status of a large family. In an era of demographic decline and fiscal constraints, demographic / family policies need to be focused on what parents consider as important in order to affect their decisions. Given that the demographic decline has a negative cascading effect on several aspects of economy, society and personal life, selecting the policies that work best according to parents’ views who are the decision makers in these policy field, should be an imperative for governments nowadays.

Coercion in Disguise? A Reassessment of Brazilian Education and Health Reforms

In federations and other regionalised arrangements, the search for co-operation may lead to a hierarchical alignment where the centre concentrates policy decision-making power. The use of conditional grants to build this kind of co-ordination can disguise its rather coercive character when opt-out clauses are counteracted by fiscal constraints that virtually force subnational adherence. Previous accounts on recentralisation in Latin America have overlooked this feature, particularly by mistakenly identifying the transfer of fiscal resources and responsibilities with authority over policies. The article adopts a configurational approach, focused on mechanisms, to reassess two Brazilian programmes redesigned in the 1990s and 2000s – the Fundamental Education Fund (Fundef) and the Basic Health Care Programme ( Programa de Atenção Básica, PAB). Our evidence shows that both reforms followed hierarchical paths and received massive adherence of municipalities. We discuss how this kind of coercion in disguise is especially concerning in settings where some retrenchment of social expenditure is expected.

Lessons for the Age of Consequences: COVID-19 and the Macroeconomy

Based on comparative empirical evidence for 22 major OECD countries, I argue that country differences in cumulative mortality impacts of SARS-CoV-2 are largely caused by: (1) weaknesses in public health competence by country; (2) pre-existing country-wise variations in structural socio-economic and public health vulnerabilities; and (3) the presence of fiscal constraints. The paper argues that these pre-existing conditions, all favorable to the coronavirus, have been created, and amplified, by four decades of neoliberal macroeconomic policies – in particular by (a) the deadly emphasis on fiscal austerity (which diminished public health capacities, damaged public health and deepened inequalities and vulnerabilities); (b) the obsessive belief of macroeconomists in a trade-off between ‘efficiency’ and ‘equity’, which is mostly used to erroneously justify rampant inequality; (c) the complicit endorsement by mainstream macro of the unchecked power over monetary and fiscal policy-making of global finance and the rentier class; and (d) the unhealthy aversion of mainstream macro (and MMT) to raising taxes, which deceives the public about the necessity to raise taxes to counter the excessive liquidity preference of the rentiers and to realign the interests of finance and of the real economy. The paper concludes by outlining a few lessons for a saner macroeconomics.

Local Government in Japan

To understand the complex dynamics and role of local government in Japan’s democracy, three related questions need to be addressed. First, how much capacity and autonomy do local governments have to act? Second, what impact does local government have on national-level elections and policies? And finally, how responsive and accountable are local governments to residents? This chapter will seek to address these questions by first laying out the institutional framework of Japan’s local government system, including its recent decentralization reforms. In the second section, it illustrates how these institutional features combine with underlying socioeconomic conditions to shape local representation and intergovernmental relations. In the third section, it briefly considers two interlinked and key challenges facing local government: combatting depopulation and improving representation. The chapter finds that Japanese local government is significant in scale and indispensable to the administration of the Japanese state; decentralization reforms have further expanded local responsibilities while minimizing interventions from the central government; local governments continue to have a significant impact on the national arena, both electorally and policy-wise; local policy innovations in a wide range of areas have been co-opted nationally, while local lobbying and opposition pressures have induced central governments to respond to local interests; aside from some exceptional periods and limited regions, local government representation has not been driven by partisan or programmatic competition; and, more recently, local voters are demanding more of their representatives who have lost their clientelist role as communities face increasingly competitive environments, fiscal constraints, and pressures to innovate.