Comparing from and for Latin American Political Economy

Abstract

Latin American Political Economy is at a crossroads. From the 1980s to the 2010s, Latin American countries' economic and political situation has been explained mainly by resorting to a series of imported and totalizing theories and concepts. We refer, for example, to the analyses resulting from analytical waves, such as the third wave of democratization, the Washington Consensus, the left turn, and the conservative (re)turn. Most of these paradigms have explained the local reality as an atypical case of the dynamics observed in the global north. In other cases, local phenomena have been interpreted by drawing repeated intra-regional parallels with previous periods. In this panel, we are interested in papers that question such uniform explanations. We seek papers that address complex questions and provide original answers that consider the specificities or dynamics of the countries of the Latin American region. We invite academics who analyze what it means to make public policies in a region whose economic insertion is governed by the dynamics of financial subordination. To what extent can regional governments move away from global neoliberalism and build alternative economic paradigms? More generally, this panel includes empirical and theoretical papers that analyze how different recent global phenomena - i.e., the strengthening of global neoliberalism, the worldwide spread of populist governments, and the economic management of the post-pandemic world -are constraining or fostering the space Latin American governments have to solve critical issues, such as decreasing economic subordination, redirecting monetary and trade policy, revitalizing the role of the state in development, attenuating social inequality, etc. We are especially interested in case studies and comparative works that analyze processes of convergence or divergence in socio-political trajectories.

Title	Details
How do we pay, and who benefits from payments? Understanding Payment infrastructures in Latin America	View Paper Details
The politics of capital mobility in dollarized economies: comparing Ecuador and El Salvador	View Paper Details
Peripheral expertise: Latin American paths to combat financial tsunamis	View Paper Details