By the dawn of the 21st century, more than half of the world's population was living in urban areas. This volume explores the implications of this unprecedented expansion in the world's most urbanized region, Latin America, exploring the new urban reality, and the consequences for both Latin America and the rest of the developing world.

This book evaluates the impact of 20 years of urban policies in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. It argues that evaluating the fulfillment of past commitments is essential for framing and meeting the new commitments that were taken in Habitat III over the next 20 years. Taken as a whole, the book provides a critical assessment of the economic, social and environmental consequences of urban interventions during Habitat II. The country-level chapters have been written by recognized experts in urban issues, with first-hand knowledge of the Habitat process, and deep familiarity with the problems, statistics, actors and political contexts of their nations. The latter part of the volume considers wider topics such as the Habitat Commitment Index, the New Urban Agenda and the regional and global-scale lessons that can be extracted from this group of countries. Urban Policy in Latin America will be of interest to advanced students, researchers and policymakers across development economics, urban studies and Latin American studies.

Latin America has experienced a profound transformation in the first two decades of the 21st century: it has been fully incorporated into the global economy, while excluding regions and populations devalued by the logic of capitalism. Technological modernization has gone hand-in-hand with the reshaping of old identities and the emergence of new ones. The transformation of Latin America has been shaped by social movements and political conflicts. The neoliberal model that dominated the first stage of the transformation induced widespread inequality and poverty, and triggered social explosions that led to its own collapse. A new model, neo-developmentalism, emerged from these crises as national populist movements were elected to government in several countries. The more the state intervened in the economy, the more it became vulnerable to corruption, until the rampant criminal economy came to penetrate state institutions. Upper middle classes defending their privileges and citizens indignant because of corruption of the political elites revolted against the new regimes, undermining the model of neo-developmentalism. In the midst of political disaffection and public despair, new social movements, women, youth, indigenous people, workers, peasants, opened up avenues of hope against the background of darkness invading the continent. This book, written by two leading scholars of Latin America, provides a comprehensive and up-do-date account of the new Latin America that is in the process of taking shape today. It will be an indispensable text for students and scholars in Latin American Studies, sociology, politics and media and communication studies, and anyone interested in Latin America today.

Globalization and Development draws upon the experiences of the Latin American and Caribbean region to provide a multidimensional assessment of the globalization process from the perspective of developing countries. Based on a study by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), this book gives a historical overview of economic development in the region and presents both an economic and noneconomic agenda that addresses disparity, respects diversity, and fosters complementarity among regional, national, and international institutions. For orders originating outside of North America, please visit the World Bank website for a list of distributors and geographic discounts at http://publications.worldbank.org/howtoorder or e-mail [email protected].

This issue of International Development Policy looks at recent paradigmatic innovations and development trajectories in Latin America, focusing on the Andean region. It aims to enrich our understanding of recent development debates and processes in Latin America, and what the rest of the world can learn from them.

The volume takes a broad view of recent social, political, and economic developments in Latin America. It contains six essays, focused on salient and cross-cutting themes, that try to construct a thread or narrative about the highly diverse region, highlighting its main idiosyncrasies and analyzing where it might be headed in coming years. While the essays recognize considerable advances, they also point out setbacks and missed opportunities that have stood in the way of sustained progress. Strengthening state capacity emerges as a significant challenge.

In this sweeping history of United States policy toward Latin America, Lars Schoultz shows that the United States has always perceived Latin America as a fundamentally inferior neighbor, unable to manage its affairs and stubbornly underdeveloped. This perception of inferiority was apparent from the beginning. John Quincy Adams, who first established diplomatic relations with Latin America, believed that Hispanics were lazy, dirty, nasty...a parcel of hogs. In the early nineteenth century, ex-President John Adams declared that any effort to implant democracy in Latin America was as absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts, and fishes. Drawing on extraordinarily rich archival sources, Schoultz, one of the country's foremost Latin America scholars, shows how these core beliefs have not changed for two centuries. We have combined self-interest with a civilizing mission--a self-abnegating effort by a superior people to help a substandard civilization overcome its defects. William Howard Taft felt the way to accomplish this task was to knock their heads together until they should maintain peace, while in 1959 CIA Director Allen Dulles warned that the new Cuban officials had to be treated more or less like children. Schoultz shows that the policies pursued reflected these deeply held convictions. While political correctness censors the expression of such sentiments today, the actions of the United States continue to assume the political and cultural inferiority of Latin America. Schoultz demonstrates that not until the United States perceives its southern neighbors as equals can it anticipate a constructive hemispheric alliance.

The UN currently estimates that there are about 837 million urban slum dwellers worldwide, and this figure is likely to rise to 1.5 billion by 2020 if current trends are not reversed. This book offers five geographically and institutionally diverse case studies from Latin America, where some of the longest-running and most successful programmes in this field have been conducted. These programmes, involving a wide variety of funding arrangements and agencies, demonstrate the positive impact that community participation and people-oriented service solutions can have on slum upgrading efforts in low income urban areas.

Foreword .-- Introduction .-- Part 1. Social policy institutions. -- Chapter I. Institutional framework for social development / Rodrigo Martínez, Carlos Maldonado Valera .-- Chapter II. Social development and social protection institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean: overview and challenges / Rodrigo Martínez, Carlos Maldonado Valera .-- Part 2. Components and institutional framewoek of social protection. -- Chapter III. Labour market regulation and social protection: institutional challenges / Mario D. Velásquez Pinto .-- Chapter IV. Institutional aspects of Latin America's pension systems / Andras Uthoff .-- Chapter V. Care as a pillar of social protection: rights, policies and institutions in Latin America / María Nieves Rico, Claudia Robles .-- Part 3. Policies for specific populations and their institutional framework .-- Chapter VI. Life cycle and social policies: youth institutions in the region / Daniela Trucco .-- Chapter VII. Disability and public policy: institutional progress and challenges in Latin America / Heidi Ullmann .-- Chapter VIII. Latin American Afrodescendants: institutional framework and public policies / Marta Rangel.