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During the euro crisis, the sustainability of Spain’s debt burden was called into question. By 2019, however, Spain had successfully navigated its own crisis and reduced its debt burden. What role did Spain’s emerging fiscal federal system play in this recovery? We analyze the performance of Spain’s fiscal federalist framework and how it affected the country’s budgetary balance, with a special emphasis on its coordination and on political relationships within the autonomous regions. Contrary to what advocates of the benefits of fiscal coordination argue, we find that coordination does not prevent the erosion of fiscal discipline in regions. Our results show that politics, rather than fiscal rules and frameworks, play an important role and have led to differing fiscal performance. In regions where incumbents were re-elected, coordination is employed to ensure more positive budgetary balances. Conversely, in regions with changing incumbents, coordination serves as an indicator of future fiscal problems.
This article, building on the emerging theoretical corpus of “reputation theory” provides an alternative explanation about how successful policies are obtained in contexts of bureaucratic weakness and volatile politics. The argument is that politicians choose to intervene in delivering successful policies based on how contributable such policies are to construct their political reputations. The findings suggest that in both countries, less tenured politicians face higher incentives to build their reputations, so they choose to deliver better policies to accumulate “successful experiences” as vitae for electoral purposes. Tenured politicians, in turn, opt for inaction or strategic delivery, to preserve their already won political reputations. The present article brings evidence from the education sector of Peru and Bolivia, a sector that has been at the core of these countries' priorities for decades. Through a mixed methods approach involving a panel regression and in‐depth interviews, results obtained largely confirm this article's claims.
This article explains how after 43 years of unsatisfactory outcomes, the Ministry of Education of Peru (MoE) suddenly ranked at the top of governmental performance tables. To do so, this study relies on implementation and major discussions of policy instrument theories to provide a comprehensive explanation of the reasons underlying the MoE’s improvements. Methodologically, this research employs the mixed research methods paradigm. It combines process-tracing and regression analysis. The analyses show that the MoE underwent three major events in its route to achieve policy success. First, the approval of a long-term policy plan (National Educative Plan to 2021); second, the contentious legitimisation of governmental policies against Peru’s teachers’ union and its eventual defeat; and, third, the recentralisation of historically dispersed control functions in the MoE. The results indicate that upon the occurrence of these reforms, MoE’s bureaucrats could gain teachers’ legitimacy and eventually achieve complementarity of policy tools. In fact, the multiple regression analysis suggests positive and significant interdependence between the set of tools employed by MoE officers: parents’ voluntary monetary contribution to schools (sermon), economic incentives to outperform schools (carrots) and trimestral oversight of schools’ performance (sticks). Results also show that MoE’s tools are positively associated with satisfactory student-learning outcomes.
Los experimentos comerciales en América Latina han sido extremos, en muchos casos radicales, y en otros, guiados por la presencia de potencias extranjeras que expanden sus intereses en la región (Jordana y Ramió, 2002). En este conjunto de experiencias, América Latina se debate entre iniciativas locales fundamentadas en pactos internacionales que permitirían elevar el nivel de competitividad y el poder de negociación de sus países. Hasta la fecha, la región cuenta con aproximadamente 30 organismos multilaterales, los cuales han sido creados con fines de integración, pero más importante, con el objetivo de alinear proyectos económicos con proyectos políticos (López-Bermúdez, Freire y Montes, 2018). Estos, a su vez, se alinearon con los intereses de grandes potencias extranjeras y persiguen acuerdos comerciales con ellas de tal forma que reflejan también opciones políticas. Tal vez la más clara de las diferencias muestran la división entre bloques económicos (Milán et.al. 2015). En el 2004, en la Habana, Cuba, se creó la Alianza Bolivariana, o ALBA, que busca la integración comercial autóctona en América Latina, en respuesta a las pretensiones estadounidenses de establecer un área de libre comercio en la Américas (Botto 2015). Es importante recalcar que este bloque comercial, a su vez, buscó establecer un área de libre comercio bajo la doctrina política del bolivarianismo -de largo discutido hasta el día de hoy. Indudablemente las alineaciones políticas y comerciales del ALBA indujeron la entrada de potencias emergentes como Rusia, China y entonces Brasil que también promovieron una política comercial alternativa a los Estados Unidos (Bartesaghi, 2015).
Organization studies have long built a ‘business case’ for diversity, which today includes innovation capacity among the benefits of diverse workforces. Diversity’s impact on innovation has been tested in private firms, yet no systematic study exists in public management. We address this challenge using a twostep dynamic panel data analysis via generalised methods of moments estimation in 36 European countries. The findings confirm that higher public workforce diversity leads to higher public sector innovation. This effect, however, is mediated by the administrative ecosystem, where greater uniformity in managerial practices makes diversity more salient, an obstacle to unleash its innovative potential.
Organizational studies have long built a ‘business case’ for diversity, which today includes innovation capacity among the benefits of diverse workforces. Diversity’s impact on innovation has been tested in private firms, yet few systematic studies exist in public management. We address this challenge using a two-step dynamic panel data analysis via generalized methods of moment estimation in 36 European countries. The findings confirm that higher public workforce diversity leads to higher public service innovation. This effect, however, is mediated by the administrative ecosystem, where greater uniformity in managerial practices makes diversity more salient, an obstacle to unleash its innovative potential.
Following the establishment of the World Trade Organisationin January 1995, American and European trade relationships werefor a timecharacterised by ‘competitive interdependence’,astheUS and EUsimultaneously aimedtoadvance their commercial interests inthird countries. Under conditions of competitive interdependence, trade actorsresort to certain policy choices to gain advantage for their producers while restricting others’ ability to enter a market (Sbragia, 2010).In the last decade, however, European and American trade policymakers have facedthe challenges of a more competitive world and the emergence of newer trade powers such as China. Both actors have veered away frommultilateral deals as their preferred trade policy choices. In this paper, weuse the Sbragia (2010) framework to analyse the trade policy shifts made bythe EU and the US in the last decade. We argue that what had been a competitive interdependence relationship has recently changed toa trilateral structure in which both the EU and the US have focused their attention on countering Chinese competition. Moreover, China’s emergence has also pushed the USto reinvigorate the role of unilateralism and the EU to bolsterbilateralism as they both seek to secure their commercial shares worldwide.