Learning, Policy Making, and Market Reforms

Covadonga Meseguer has a PhD in political science and is a member of the Juan March Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Madrid, Spain). She has been a Fulbright Fellow at New York University, a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, a Visiting Fellow at the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and a Visiting Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Dr Meseguer has written on globalization, the internationalization of policies, and Latin American political economy. Her work has been published in the Review of International Political Economy, the Journal of Public Policy, Rationality and Society, the European Journal of Political Economy, and others. Dr Meseguer is currently a researcher at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Mexico City, and Visiting Professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (IBEI), Barcelona.

• 1. The question; 2. The model; 3. Learning and development strategies; 4. Learning and privatization; 5. Learning and capital account openness; 6. Learning and IMF agreements; 7. Lessons about learning.

'Learning, Policy Making, and Market Reforms is a benchmark study of the influence of ideas on policy changes. Why do politicians undertake risky economic reforms? In times of hardship and uncertainty, do they simply emulate what other governments do? Are they influenced by the nature of the regime, the ideology of the governments, the proximity of elections, the social and political costs of reforms? Or are politicians rational learners, searching for information, either from their own past or from other countries, about which policies work, accordingly updating their initial beliefs? The book tests a theoretically sophisticated model of learning with massive quantitative evidence on the changes in the strategies of economic development, programs of privatization, IMF agreements, and liberalization of capital accounts that took place in the 1980s and 1990s, in both developing and developed countries. The result is an exceptionally insightful analysis that will be an essential reference for students of political economy and comparative politics.' Jose Maria Maravall, Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (CEACS), Fundación Juan March, Spain