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The literature on the political economy of remittances largely agrees that as households receive income from migrants abroad they will be less dependent on government goods and patronage. The underlying assumption is that remittance inflows are stable and increasing. The global economic recession of 2008 and 2009 led to major declines in remittance inflows. This paper asks two different but related questions: (1) Do remittance recipients support redistribution? and (2) Do preferences for redistribution change following a negative shock to remittances? Using three waves of survey data, I find that remittance recipients diverge from non-recipients in favoring redistribution following the sudden decline in remittances. I test for possible mechanisms such as dependence on remittances and relative income levels to explain this change in preferences. I find that remittance recipients who are more dependent on remittances or not inclined to emigrate are more likely to favor redistribution following the negative shock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, Chinese involvement in Latin American infrastructure development has increased dramatically. The influx of Chinese investment along with Chinese construction workers, engineers, and equipment has led scholars and observers to question whether there a distinct model of Chinese infrastructure development. Does China take an integrated approach in Latin America — financing, designing, and executing projects — or does it operate as any other foreign country or company? We develop the concept of infrastructure dominance to answer these questions. Using data on over 400 of the most important public infrastructure projects, we find that China's involvement in projects varies based on the existing institutional constraints of the host country. Where countries have strong institutions, Chinese companies play a role similar to that of other foreign entities involved in infrastructure development. In Latin American countries with weak infrastructure institutions, however, China plays a very different role — it tends to dominate projects. Thus, this paper highlights the adaptability of the Chinese approach and the importance of domestic institutions for shaping the nature of infrastructure development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of countervailing external pressures on labor rights in 17 Latin American countries. On the one hand, these countries have been urged to reform their labor laws and practices to comply with international labor standards, including protections for the collective rights of workers. On the other hand, they have been pressured to adopt more flexible labor markets, which often undermine collective labor organization. After dividing the countries by the type of political regime that prevailed when the pattern of relations between labor and the state was being established, the paper presents and explains the results of indices created to measure two outcomes: labor standards and labor market flexibility. It then analyzes the impact of four types of external actors (the ILO, national governments pursuing trade agreements, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions) on these outcomes, both de jure and de facto. The paper's main finding is that these actors have had an impact on labor outcomes in the region, but that their influence is heavily mediated by domestic factors, particularly historical legacies of state-labor relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, intellectual property rights protections have increased in Central America. Transnational access to medicines campaigns focused particular attention on the public health implications of these protections in the context of debates around the ratification of the US-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), but these efforts did not lead to long-term engagement with intellectual property and access questions by local health activists. This paper explores differences in priority focus between global access to medicines movement and local health activists in Central America, arguing that transnational access advocates' core arguments rely on assumptions that mesh poorly with on-the-ground realities in Central America. I examine differences in drug markets and political alliances, suggesting that these factors help explain the imperfect connection between global access to medicines frames and the needs of patients and advocates in Central America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard economic theories of wage inequality focus on the factor-biased nature of technological change and globalization. This paper examines the long-run development of industrial wage inequality in Latin America from a global comparative perspective. We find that wage inequality was comparatively modest during the first half of the twentieth century, but rising much faster during the post-war era than in other industrial countries. In-depth analyses of wage inequality trends in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile confirm this pattern, but also reveal notable country peculiarities. In Argentina and Chile, trend breaks coincided with large political-institutional shocks while in Brazil, wage inequality increased unabated under the wage regulation policies of successive post-war administrations. We argue that without taking national policies with respect to education and the labor market into account, economic theory cannot explain 'Latin American' patterns of wage inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]