Este documento es un resumen de cada una de las ponencias -y sus respectivos comentarios- presentadas en el Simposio sobre Migración Internacional en las Américas, celebrado en septiembre de 2000 en San José de Costa Rica. Las contribuciones están ordenadas de acuerdo a las siete sesiones de trabajo contempladas, y son acompañadas por una síntesis de los aspectos más destacados. Las sesiones abarcaron los siguientes temas: a); tendencias y patrones migratorios en las Américas, b); relaciones entre migración y desarrollo, c); gobernabilidad de la migración y diplomacia multilateral, d); importa…
En este trabajo se examina la política, el derecho y la administración de la bioseguridad en América Latina y el Caribe, colocándose un énfasis especial en la relación entre los organismos vivos modificados resultantes de la biotecnología moderna y la conservación y uso sostenible de la diversidad biológica. Para ese efecto, se analiza la manera como se ha ido generando, en un grupo seleccionado de ocho países de la región, una política de bioseguridad y, en especial, de seguridad de la biotecnología, así como la instrumentación jurídica y administrativa que se ha hecho de esa política, consid…
Abstract This paper argues that the design of the international financial system should take into consideration three different problems that the current system faces: financial market instability; basic macroeconomic and financial asymmetries that characterize the international economy; and the additional problems generated by the incomplete and asymmetric nature of the current globalization process. It proposes a useful analytic distinction between truly systemic issues, which focus on world economic stability, and center-periphery issues, which are closely associated with the corre…
Resumen
En el año 1998, el Instituto
Nacional de Estadística (INE); incorporó tres tipos de cambios en el relevamiento de la
Encuesta Continua de Hogares (ECH);. Por un lado, los datos obtenidos con el Censo de
Población y Viviendas de 1996 permitieron actualizar el marco muestral. En particular,
ello significó incluir la periferia de Montevideo y las localidades conurbadas con las
ciudades grandes del Interior del país. Por otro lado, el INE optó por excluir a las
localidades pequeñas de la muestra, pasando de cubrir los centros poblados con al menos
900 personas a las localidades con 5.000 h…
Resumen
Las reformas a los sistemas de salud en el mundo, están a la orden del día; los desafíos que enfrentan los formuladores de política en casi todos los países, son bastante similares: hacer un sistema de salud en el que tanto la financiación como la prestación de servicios de salud sean equitativos; buscar un mejoramiento en la eficiencia tanto en la financiación como en el gasto sectorial; mejorar la calidad de los servicios de salud; y lograr sistemas de salud que sean viables y sostenibles financiera y políticamente (Hsiao, 1998);. El sistema de salud colombiano es uno de los que han …
Resumen
El propósito de este estudio es analizar la participación del sector privado en el sistema de salud de Costa Rica, a la luz del proceso de reforma institucional que se encuentra en marcha. El estudio analiza el papel del sector privado desde cuatro perspectivas complementarias: (1); los patrones de utilización de servicios públicos y privados (con base en las Encuestas de Hogares de la última década);; (2); los flujos de gasto entre entes financieros, compradores y proveedores del sistema, a través de la construcción de un juego de Cuentas Nacionales de Salud para el año 1998; (3); los…
El proceso de integración ha avanzado de forma impresionante en América Latina y el Caribe en los últimos años, desde la liberalización de los intercambios recíprocos hasta los recientes llamamientos a coordinar las polítcas macroeconómicas de los países. Se ha planteado, sin embargo, si la profundización de este proces constituye la mejor estrategia de crecimiento económico, inspirándose en el ejemplo de la Unión Europea, o si resulta preferible una inserción plena y directa de los países en la economía mundial, a semejanza de lo realizado por los países del sudeste asiático. En esta óptica, …
The view that pervasive economic insecurity threatens political support for the ongoing market-oriented reforms has become one of the most common refrains in current discussions on Latin American affairs. Dealing with economic insecurity would thus appear to be a key part of the unfinished agenda of Latin America's reforms. The author argues that economic insecurity in Latin America is multifaceted and has many sources that feed on each other. Some of the insecurity arises from the decline in employment protection and increased volatility of household outcomes. Some of it is the result of…
The severe international financial crises which rocked the Latin American economies in the 1980s and 1990s suggest that the international financial system suffers from serious defects. This article looks at one of the reforms which has been mooted in recent years: strengthening regional financial cooperation. It concludes that a Latin American fund made up of a modest portion of the reserves of the countries of the region, possibly backed up with contingency credits from the international banking system, could be an effective line of defense against financial crises caused by capital flight an…
Now that the 1990s have ended and a new millennium is dawning, the low rate of economic growth, the region's vulnerability to international financial instability and the limited progress made in terms of equity oblige us to reflect on the social agenda for the future. An important role in that agenda will continue to be played by the efforts to overcome poverty and indigence, conditioned to a large extent by the region's capacity for economic change and its dynamism in creating large numbers of jobs of higher quality in terms of productivity and income. At the same time, in view of t…
This article analyses the education policies applied in Brazil in the six-year period from 1995 through 2000. After noting the need to prepare citizens and the country to face the twenty-first century, it addresses the long-standing lag in Brazilian education and the general characteristics of the educational system of that country. It then describes the educational policy options adopted in the period in question, which were aimed primarily at the expanding the system while improving its quality, and analyses the special features of the programmes in the field of basic education (understood a…
This article analyses the reforms put into effect in the mid-1990s with the aim of setting in motion a process of profound changes in pre-school, basic and secondary education in Chile, the main changes made, and some of the achievements and difficulties of this process as seen at the present day. It begins by describing the initial context of the reforms, in which, as the objectives of full coverage of the educational system had been largely achieved, the new objective addressed was to improve the quality of education with equity. It also makes reference to the institutional changes which had…
Confronted with recurrent macroeconomic shocks, governments in Latin America and the Caribbean have increasingly been concerned about establishing or strengthening systems of social protection and safety net programmes. The goal of these programmes is to help mitigate the impact of shocks on the poor before they occur, and to help the poor cope with the shocks once they have occurred. In this paper, we focus on publicly funded or mandated safety nets functioning as risk-coping mechanisms. The paper reviews the characteristics of a good safety net, in comparison with the main types of safety ne…
This article holds that ensuring the full sway of economic, social and cultural rights makes it possible to advance towards greater equality of opportunities, both for attaining well-being and for asserting differences in the field of identity. This development of the effective use of rights must be complemented with new forms of citizenship connected with the possibility of interaction with the media and greater participation in the knowledge-based society. Only in this way does it seem feasible to give an ethical foundation to social and development policies which have been deprived of ideol…
This article analyses the relations between the international specialization pattern and growth. For this purpose, it adopts as its analytical framework the recent literature emphasizing the importance of initial conditions and public policies, and not only factor endowment. It also analyses the empirical and economic policy implications of this approach. After an introduction (section I);, section II presents the analytical framework: a model with two internationally tradeable goods sectors and a non-tradeable inputs sector, with increasing returns to scale and dynamic pecuniary externalities…
National levels of unemployment in Trinidad and Tobago have remained consistently high since the 1980s, because of the economic recession, subsequent structural adjustment arrangements and the diminution of traditional labour-intensive activities such as estate agriculture. Groups which had been dependent upon casual employment that was available in pre-recession times have been experiencing chronic unemployment. Combining extremely irregular casual employment with activity in the informal sector, they occupy a marginal and precarious position in the labour market. This study examines the way …
More free time and disposable income not only in developed but also in emerging countries have generated a demand that shipping lines have capitalized on by offering ocean cruise services to an exponentially growing segment of the tourist industry. With the search for alternative destinations for ocean cruises, in recent years the Southern Cone countries of Latin America have been playing host to an encouraging number of passenger ships during the summer November-March season, suggesting that this sub-region could become a permanent feature of the circuit of international ocean cruises. To con…
La mayor disponibilidad de tiempo libre y de ingresos personales, no sólo en los países desarrollados, sino también de los emergentes, ha generado una demanda que, los armadores de naves han sabido capitalizar mediante la oferta de servicios de cruceros en un segmento de la industria turística que observa un aumento exponencial.En la búsqueda de destinos alternativos para los cruceros turísticos, en años recientes los países del Cono Sur del continente, han recibido en la temporada veraniega noviembre-marzo una cantidad alentadora de naves de turismo y pasajeros, lo que permite vislumbrar la i…