Limiting Resources: Market-Led Reform and the Transformation of Public Goods by LaDawn Haglund, The Pennsylvania State University Press (2010), 247 pp., $64.95 (hardcover)
Of all the economic reforms made in Latin America under the neoliberal model, privatization produced the greatest “targeted resistance,” the author argues. While focusing on the water and energy sectors in El Salvador and Costa Rica, the book tackles privatization’s most fundamental issues, debunking the claim that it provides more efficient solutions to pressing problems than the state, especially in the area of essential public services. It examines the massive resistance that privatization provoked in Latin America and exposes the powerful interests and forces behind it.
For ordinary Latin Americans, privatization has resulted in job losses, price hikes, and the undermining of democratic processes. It has failed to reduce “fiscal imbalances,” it has not improved services, and popular support for it has hit rock bottom. If “state failure is a problem” in distributing public services, the author concludes, “market failure is no less serious.” There is therefore a “pressing need to examine these [privatization] policies more closely,” the author writes, when countries “need more, not fewer, options for addressing urgent public health, social justice, and sustainability issues.” The author hopes the book will “keep alive doubts about the inevitability of neoliberal globalization, and reilluminate dimly lit paths” to a more sustainable future.
Mexico’s Economic Dilemma: The Developmental Failure Of Neoliberalism by James M. Cypher and Raul Delgado Wise, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2010), 209 pp., $70 (hardcover)
In the 1980s Mexico dramatically shifted its economic model to one guided by the “neoliberal nostrums of the Chicago School of Economics.” According to the authors, Mexico today remains “enthralled with—and impaled upon—these ultra laissez faire precepts.” The country’s economic slide during the U.S. recession, culminating in a 9% contraction in 2009, exposes an economic dilemma: The recession demonstrates that the Mexican agro-export economic model under NAFTA is “bankrupt” and “intolerable” for ordinary Mexicans; but at the same time, “the nation exists under conditions determined by an institutional ‘lock-in’ effect that serves to guarantee that fundamental structural change” will not happen.
The book shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, Mexico’s economic model is not based on manufacturing exports and free trade. Rather, the country has a new model, one in which Mexico becomes a labor-exporting nation—sending its impoverished people to work in maquiladoras and in the various industries that attract undocumented migrants in the United States. The book takes on these issues using a wide-ranging, historically based political and socioeconomic analysis and offers some potential alternatives. But the authors conclude: “Mexico’s long agony under the unbearable burden of neoliberalism . . . currently shows no definitive signs of ending.”
Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development by Fernando Ignacio Leiva, University of Minnesota Press (2008), 245 pp., $25 (paperback)
This book offers a critique of “neostructuralism,” or the economic model and policies of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (all of which, incidentally, have been lumped into the “good left” category by the United States). Neostructuralism, the author writes, challenges and offers an alternative to the neoliberal economic model. “Neostructuralism neither ‘caves in’ to neoliberalism,” the author asserts, “nor brings about a sharp rupture” with it. The book contrasts neostructuralism, or “globalization with a human face,” with Venezuela’s 21st century socialism.
The economic model promoted by the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA), according to the author, challenges one of the fundamental “assumptions of neostructuralism, that is, [that] no conflict exists between satisfying the requirements of transnational capital and reducing poverty and inequality in the region.” Neostructuralism, he writes, needs to undergo both serious self-critique and to reconnect “with the best traditions of critical political economy in Latin American critical thinking”—or else it will bind itself “even more firmly to its present role of defending a status quo increasingly dominated by transnational finance capital.” Latin America, the author concludes, “remains still to be shaped by the reemergence of a more radical and critical political economy.”
