A wide-ranging examination of how policies, parties, and labor strength affect inequality in post-industrial societies.Not all countries are unequal in the same ways or to the same degree. In Challenging Inequality, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens analyze different patterns of increasing income inequality in post-industrial societies since the 1980s, assessing the policies and social structures best able to mitigate against the worst effects of market in...

Although inequality in Latin America ranks among the worst in the world, it has notably declined over the last decade, offset by improvements in health care and education, enhanced programs for social assistance, and increases in the minimum wage.In Democracy and the Left, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens argue that the resurgence of democracy in Latin America is key to this change. In addition to directly affecting public policy, democratic institutions enable left-lean...

This Handbook offers a comprehensive treatment of transformations of the state, from its origins in different parts of the world and different time periods to its transformations since World War II in the advanced industrial countries, the post-Communist world, and the Global South. Leading experts in their fields, from Europe and North America, discuss conceptualizations and theories of the state and the transformations of the state in its engagement with a changing international environm...

The IMF is a purposive actor in world politics, primarily driven by a set of homogenous economic ideas, Stephen C. Nelson suggests, and its professional staff emerged from an insular set of American-trained economists. The IMF treats countries differently depending on whether that staff trusts the country's top officials; that trust in turn depends on the educational credentials of the policy team that Fund officials face across the negotiating table. Intellectual differen...

Globalization and Competition explains why some middle-income countries, principally those in Asia, grow fast while others are not successful. The author criticizes both old-style developmentalism and the economics of the Washington Consensus. He argues instead for a 'new developmentalism' or third approach that builds on a national development strategy. This approach differs from the neoliberal strategy that rich nations propose to emerging economies principally on macroeconomic grounds. ...

The welfare state has been under attack for decades, but now more than ever there is a need for strong social protection systems—the best tools we have to combat inequality, support social justice, and even improve economic performance. In this book, José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz bring together distinguished contributors to examine the global variations of social programs and make the case for a redesigned twenty-first-century welfare state.The Welfare State Revisi...

This book argues that Latin America has a distinctive, enduring form of hierarchical capitalism characterized by multinational corporations, diversified business groups, low skills and segmented labor markets. Over time, institutional complementarities knit features of corporate governance and labor markets together and thus contribute to institutional resiliency. Political systems generally favored elites and insiders who further reinforced existing institutions and complementarities. Hie...

One of the principal goals of antipoverty efforts should be to improve the absolute living standards of the least well-off. This book aims to enhance our understanding of how to do that, drawing on the experiences of twenty affluent countries since the 1970s. The book addresses a set of questions at the heart of political economy and public policy: How much does economic growth help the poor? When and why does growth fail to trickle down? How can social policy help? Can a country have a si...

This open access Regional Reader describes how Mexico - United States migration changed substantially during the first decade of the 21st Century. The book provides an in-depth analysis on the changes in the flows into and out of both countries, thus highlighting the issues arising from Mexico - US migration as well as addressing the large numbers of adults and children entering Mexico from the United States. It covers how this tidal change affects the Hispanic population of the U.S. and r...

This award-winning book "skillfully blends economic and political analysis" to assess the challenges of urban governments (Emmett H. Buell, Jr., American Political Science Review).Winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairsMany simply presume that a city's politics are like a nation's politics, just on a smaller scale. But the nature of the...

How does social spending relate to economic growth and which countries have got this right and wrong? Peter Lindert examines the experience of countries across the globe to reveal what has worked, what needs changing, and who the winners and losers are under different systems. He traces the development of public education, health care, pensions, and welfare provision, and addresses key questions around intergenerational inequality and fiscal redistribution, the returns to investment in hum...

Historically, residential segregation of Latinos has generally been seen as a result of immigration and the process of self-segregation into ethnic enclaves. The only theoretical exception to ethnic enclave Latino segregation has been the structural inequality related to Latinos that have a high degree of African ancestry. This study of the 331 metropolitan area in the United States between 1990 and 2000 shows that Latinos are facing structural inequalities outside of the degree of African...