Resumo

IBARRA, David. Reform and Institutions. Economía UNAM [online]. 2006, vol.3, n.8, pp.11-20. ISSN 1665-952X.

Today, interest in institutional issues has emerged among other things from the need to explain or justify the skimpy results of the policies emerging from the Washington Consensus that were so docilely applied in Latin America. These results contrast with the experiences of India, China or Korea, countries which achieved striking rates of development implementing institutional policies and arrangements that broke with the consensus's orthodoxy. The comparison between the Washington Consensus's hopeful goals and the resulting reality of quasi-stagnation and social exclusion in Latin America has led its defenders to identify the cause as institutional vacuums or governmental mistakes. Undoubtedly, vacuums and institutional imperfections explain part of the failures, but the root of the problem is in the biases and limitations of the original strategic proposals, including the institutional proposals, without innovatively adapting them in Latin America.