Customer Reviews

Income and Influence: Social Policy in Emerging Market Economies

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I rarely delve into detailed descriptions of the structural mechanics of poverty, so this is an inexpert forray into the literature, but I would like to briefly recommend Income & Influence a book of less than 100 pages that covers the last few decades of unemployment and welfare policy in Latin America and southern Asia. Focusing on the awkward nexus between national interest group politics and international interest group pressures, the authors explain deficiencies in the sparse safety nets spread to "smooth consumption patterns" in the economic classes that were hardest hit by the "shock therapy" transition to open markets. These safety nets, particularly unemployment benefits and pension reform, reached only the politically organized labor sectors that had been relatively well-off before the transition period - leaving behind the more profoundly impoverished, chronically unemployed masses, and protecting only a politically aggressive cross-section of the middle class. This is hardly new information, but the book is worth a glance for two reasons: (1) it's very short and clearly written, accessible to non-economists like myself, and (2) in the first chapter, it quickly describes several partially overlapping economic theories about the causal relationships between income disparities and free trade, in a refreshingly non-ideological and straight-forward way. Anyone who has ever tried to muddle through a Foreign Affairs article on the subject will find these pages (7-11) interesting, and the comparative analyses that follow seem enlightened and insightful.