Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- The Market and the Masses in Latin America
- Part I Introduction and Theory
- Part II Mass Beliefs about Market Policies in Latin America
- 3 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES AND ELITE RHETORIC OF MARKET REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA
- 4 ARE LATIN AMERICANS NEOLIBERALS?
- 5 ARE THE POOR NEOLIBERALS?
- Part III Mass Support for Reform in Brazil
- Part IV Conclusion
- Survey Data Appendix
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
3 - THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES AND ELITE RHETORIC OF MARKET REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- The Market and the Masses in Latin America
- Part I Introduction and Theory
- Part II Mass Beliefs about Market Policies in Latin America
- 3 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES AND ELITE RHETORIC OF MARKET REFORM IN LATIN AMERICA
- 4 ARE LATIN AMERICANS NEOLIBERALS?
- 5 ARE THE POOR NEOLIBERALS?
- Part III Mass Support for Reform in Brazil
- Part IV Conclusion
- Survey Data Appendix
- References
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
In the bottom-up theoretical framework, the source of mass responses to market reforms is the impact of these policies on material well-being. In the top-down framework, the source of mass beliefs is elite rhetoric about market policies. This chapter describes the nature and content of these two independent variables in Latin America throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. In the first section, I describe the most important and visible microeconomic consequences of privatization, globalizing policies, and pension privatization. For most policies, the two most important and visible economic channels through which reforms have influenced individual welfare have been the labor-market channel and the consumption channel. I address labor-channel effects by describing how each policy has affected employment availability, wages, and other aspects of job quality. I describe consumer-channel effects by clarifying how each policy has influenced the quality, availability, and affordability of goods and services. In doing so, I explicate each policy's aggregate impact on labor markets and consumer welfare as well as its distributional consequences (i.e., varied effects across individuals) through each of these channels. In the second section, I describe the contours of elite opinion toward reforms. In both sections, I describe regionwide averages and trends. While cross-national differences certainly exist, the goal of this and the subsequent two chapters on mass opinion is to highlight and explain regionwide, not country-level, patterns.
The first section has four sets of findings. First, privatization has had mostly negative consequences for consumers because it has resulted in utility price increases.
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- Information
- The Market and the Masses in Latin AmericaPolicy Reform and Consumption in Liberalizing Economies, pp. 59 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009