Development Strategies and Social Spending

• Autores: Erik Wibbels, John Ahlquist
• Localización: Estudios / Working Papers ( Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales ), ISSN-e 2341-1961, Nº. 232, 2007
• Idioma: español
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • This paper establishes a theoretical framework linking economic strategies in the developing world to the emergence and evolution of distinct social spending regimes. In doing so, the paper has three aims: First, to identify structural factors affecting the basic contours of the developmental strategies pursued in the post-War period; second, to link key features of developmental capitalism to the birth and development of social spending regimes; and third, to examine the developmental implications of those social spending regimes in an era of opening international markets. Building on recent research in development economics and on OECD research on the affinities between varieties of capitalist development and welfare states, we present an informal model based on the fixed factor approach to political economy. In the model, land, labor and capital have preferences over the initial choice of development strategies conditional on four factors: domestic market size, the relative abundance/scarcity of labor, inequality, and the openness of the international economy. These factors combine to influence the openness of the development strategy. The development strategy then shapes the preferred type of social spending (redistributive vs. human capital) as a function of the demands the strategy places for particular kinds of labor markets and factoral bargaining over social policy. Empirical analysis of data from the 1960s and 70s finds support for the model, showing the impact of these factors in shaping social spending regimes in the developing world. We then go on to show how these social spending regimes have affected developmental trajectories over the last 20 years in the context of globalization. Overall, the results suggest that economic policies in the 1960s and 1970s had important implications for the outlines of social policy and that those early outlines are more important than "globalization" in shaping contemporary social policy.