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Distributional Coalitions and the Politics of Economic Reform in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Hector E. Schamis
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

For much of the discipline of economics, a closed economy is seen as the result of efforts of distributional coalitions and rent seekers to maintain sector-specific protections. Accordingly, economic liberalization is explained by the policy consistency of uncompromising reform elites. Students of the politics of economic adjustment in the developing world, in turn, have argued that reform programs concentrate costs in the present and disperse benefits in the future. Hence, losers are prepared to engage in collective action, whereas prospective winners, facing uncertainty about payoffs, remain disorganized. They thus posit the cohesiveness and insularity of policymakers as the main variable for explaining successful reform. Both economists and political scientists, therefore, adopt a collective action approach that overlooks how groups organize in support of liberalization.

In the recent Latin American experience, however, these reforms have preserved market reserves for firms that provided vital political support to, and often colluded with, policymaking elites. This setting has thus reproduced incentives for rent-seeking behavior, even in the presence of comprehensive liberalization. This evidence supports two interrelated theoretical claims. First, distributional coalitions may proliferate when the state withdraws from the economy, not only when it intervenes. Second, interest-based variables retain explanatory power in political economy—which state autonomy arguments disregard—irrespective of whether the economy is closed or open—which neoclassical perspectives overlook. To highlight the centrality of interest groups favoring marketization, therefore, the article suggests modifications to the dominant theories of collective action and the literature on the politics of economic adjustment.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1999

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References

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14 Haggard and Kaufman (fn. 3, 1992), 27. Even if in The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions, Haggard and Kaufman consider other variables to explain economic reform—regime type, party systems, corporatist frameworks, and electoral rules, among others—they insist that “the costs of reform tend to be concentrated, while benefits are diffused, producing perverse organizational incentives; losers are well organized, while prospective winners face daunting collective action problems and are not” (p. 157). Because of this, the explanatory power of insulated policy elites remains higher in the hierarchy than the other variables.

15 Waterbury, “The Heart of the Matter? Public Enterprise and the Adjustment Process,” in Haggard and Kaufman (fn. 3, 1992), 183.

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18 See Buchanan (fn. 9). In the same volume, Gordon Tullock, in “Rent Seeking as a Negative Sum Game,” states that “an individual who invests in something that will not actually improve productivity or will actually lower it, but that does raise his income because it gives him some special position or monopoly power, is ‘rent seeking,’ and the ‘rent’ is the income derived” (p. 17).

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37 This is the general tone of a revealing article in the conservative weekly Qué Pasa, which provides detailed information on the participation of former policymakers on the boards of these firms, many of them privatized during their tenure in office. See “El Olimpo Empresarial,” Qué Pasa (May 4, 1992)Google Scholar.

38 See Maxfield, Sylvia, Governing Capital: International Finance and Mexican Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

39 By the main architect, which includes an analysis of the main problems of stabilizing development, see Mena, Antonio Ortiz, “Desarrollo Estabilizador: Una Década de Estrategia Económica en Mexico,” El Trimestre Económico 146 (April-June 1970)Google Scholar.

40 See Bazdresch, Carlos and Levi, Santiago, “Populism and Economic Policy in Mexico, 1970—1982,” in Dornbusch, Rudiger and Edwards, Sebastian, eds., The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

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45 Ernesto Zedillo, the head of FICORCA between 1983 and 1987, was elected president in 1994.

46 See the following chapters in Garza, Esthela Gutiérrez, ed., Testimonios de la Crisis IV: Los Saldos del Sexenio (1982–1988) (Mexico D.F.: Siglo XXI, 1990)Google Scholar: Cristina Puga and Constanzo de la Vega, “Modernización Capitalista y Politica Empresarial”; and Alejandro Dávila Flores, “La Bolsa Mexicana de Valores: Alternativa Para el Financiamiento de la Inversión Productiva?”

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56 Under NAFTA, Mexican bankers managed to negotiate a gradual opening that restricts the operation of foreign banks to no more than 15 percent of the market in the first six years of the agreement (a process accelerated by the currency crisis of December 1994). See Elizondo, Carlos, “The Making of a New Alliance: The Privatization of the Banks in Mexico,” CIDE Documento de Trabajo 5 (1993)Google Scholar.

57 See Hovey, Rebecca, “The Mexican Commercial Bank Privatizations: Market Reform, Economic Power, and the Transformation of Public and Private Interests” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996)Google Scholar; and by the head of the Bank Disincorporation Unit, Martinez, Guillermo Ortiz, La Reforma Financiera y la Desincorporacion Bancaria (Mexico D.F.: FCE, 1994)Google Scholar.

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59 Conger, Lucy, “Power to the Plutocrats,” Institutional Investor (International Edition) 20 (February 1995)Google Scholar. For the dinner, see Proceso 853 (March 8, 1993)Google Scholar. Reportedly, business groups were involved in the PRI campaign since 1988, through the so-called “Comisión de Financiamiento y Consolidación Patrimonial del PRI.” See Vega, Carlos Alba, “Los Empresarios y el Estado Durante el Salinismo,” Foro International 36 (January—June 1996)Google Scholar. More on these links was revealed during the Fobaproa scandal, a $65 billion bailout of several of the privatized banks. Guillermo Ortiz Martínez, for instance, revealed the existence of political favoritism in the privatization and bailouts of the banks. See El Financiero, “Fórmense, vamos a repartir los bancos, dijo Salinas” (July 20, 1998).

60 At the time Martinez de Hoz was the president of the Argentine Economic Council (CEA), an elite organization that grouped the most traditional firms in extractive, manufacturing, and financial activities, renowned for their free-market stance. His economic team included a group of orthodox economists highly reputed in financial circles.

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66 The ensuing banking crisis prompted the government to take over fifty-nine financial institutions between March 1980 and December 1981 alone. See Giorgio, Luis and Sagari, Silvia, “Argentina's Financial Crises and Restructuring in the 1980s,” in Sheng, Andrew, ed., Bank Restructuring: Lessons from the 1980s (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1996)Google Scholar.

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74 Ambito Financiero (December 15, 1989), 1, 2.

75 In author interviews with members of the Bank Association (ADEBA) and representatives of large industrial conglomerates held between May and August 1989, several of them admitted that by February 1989 there was a widespread feeling that “something drastic had to be done” in order to make politicians understand, “once and for all,” that the business class would no longer tolerate unpredictability.

76 Author interviews with top economists of the Justicialista Party, later officials in the economy and foreign ministries, Buenos Aires, June 1989, and Washington, D.C., December 1989.

77 For this unprecedented alliance, see Gibson, Edward, Class and Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chap. 6Google Scholar.

78 See Herrera, Claudia, “The Privatization of the Argentine Telephone System,” CEPAL Review 47 (August 1992)Google Scholar.

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