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In a context of rapid technological innovation and expensive new products, the paper calls for the generation of real-world data to inform decision-making and an international discussion on the affordability of new medicines, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. Without these, the challenges of health judicialization will continue to grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing macro-historical scholarship tends to assert rather than demonstrate the wider impact of nationalism. Yet, state-sponsored national ideologies permeate the broader reaches of society to varying degrees. To investigate variations in the consolidation of official nationalism, this paper combines the content analysis of school textbooks as state-regulated and picture postcards as primarily market-driven sources. Building on this novel methodological approach, we find that textbooks published in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru promoted a similar popular nationalism that portrayed the lower classes as "true" national subjects. However, picture postcards from the same period demonstrate that the consolidation of this official national ideology varied. In Mexico and Peru, the new state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood gained presence in public life, but they did not to take hold in Argentina. We conclude that studying the top-down nationalist messages promoted by states should not be equated with studying their ideological impact in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper examines the impact of the program Seguro de Capacitación y Empleo (SCE) implemented to provide support in skills upgrading, job seeking, and job placement to eligible beneficiaries of the Argentinian conditional cash transfer program Plan Jefes . The SCE is an example of a growing trend observed in Latin America, where labor activation components have been increasingly included into cash transfers programs to support beneficiaries in finding more stable income opportunities. Despite this growing trend, not enough is known regarding the effectiveness of these components, especially on job quality. In this context, this paper sheds light on whether the provision of a comprehensive package of active labor market measures contributes to a successful labor market integration of cash transfers beneficiaries. Taking advantage of the panel structure of the Permanent Household Survey and exploiting the time variation in the assignment of the program as identification strategy, we apply difference-in-difference estimators to measure the impact on a number of labor market indicators. We find that the program affects positively the job quality of participants by increasing the probability of having a formal job and raising hourly wages. Moreover, the intervention is associated with a lower probability of having a low-paid job and working an excessive number of hours. These effects are, however, not homogeneous across all groups of participants. While the program is more successful among the younger beneficiaries, it does not contribute to an improvement in the labor market conditions of female beneficiaries, who in fact are the majority of SCE participants. Our results suggest that reducing dependency on monetary transfers through programs, such as the SCE, that are rich in activation components is beneficial for participants’ labor market trajectories and therefore, it constitutes a satisfactory exit strategy to more universal cash transfer programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to make an analysis of the main issues of environmental or ecosystem services regulations in Argentina, and a brief reference of a selection of Latin American countries laws (Peru and Costa Rica). We implemented the documental observation and normative comparative methods. One of the main results is that during last year many bills of laws were presented at the National Congress, which guidelines might be useful as precedents. Notwithstanding, in parallel an integral evaluation must be made in order to state if some valid environmental laws should be or not abolished, in order to avoid new contradictions. One of the main limitations for the argentine case, is that there is not a specific regulation about environmental services. We can conclude that in the case of other countries of the region which already have regulated the ecosystem services payment, there are some relevant issues which might be taken into account for future laws and/or public policies in Argentina. [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]

The paper examines the relationship between the performance of Latin American stock markets with their real economies, applying seven econometric models for the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. The relationship between stock market yields in these countries and their respective GDPS is examined and compared, applying to the series for each country unit root tests, cointegration analysis, error correction model analysis, Granger causality modeling, self-regression vector analysis, stimulus and response functions, and variance decomposition analysis. The series comprise the following stock markets: Argentina's MERVAL, Brazil's BOVESPA, Chile's IGPA, and Mexico's IPC, as compiled by Economática. The GDP series were obtained from the Cepalstat data base. The series are monthly and are for the period 1993-2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper links employment dynamics to the business cycle in Argentina and examines the self-employed sector. We evaluate whether this sector resembles the industrialized countries view, where it is characterized as being creative and dynamic, or the dualistic view, where it is seen as stagnant and unproductive. We study transition patterns from salaried positions and unemployment, and the evolution of the sector in the period of analysis. We found a clear segmentation. Own-account workers (accounting for over two-thirds of the self-employed) show characteristics similar to what is predicted by the dualistic view; while self-employed with employees resembles the industrialized countries view. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper describes the integration of Latin American marine fisheries into the global production system in the post-1945 period and the role of foreign and domestic fleets in this process. Through reference to the state-denial theories found in the globalisation literature, it charts the impact that the globalisation process has had upon the exploitation and sustainability of fish stocks in Latin American waters. It argues that while globalisation may indeed boost environmental awareness and lead to a more sustainable level of production through the decreased influence of local political interests, this has yet to happen in the principal Latin American fishing nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]