The paper discusses Polish privatisation from the industrial relations point of view. Itfocuses on the role of trade unions and workers councils in the privatisation process.Two polar privatisation blueprints are identified: those aiming at competitive ‘atomistic’firms and those, which...

Individualisation and precarisation as two broad trends in contemporary industrialised societies are related to one another and to certain developments in the German trade union landscape. With a focus on a reunified Germany from the nineties onwards, in this paper the impact of...

The fact that multinational companies operate (MNCs) in more than one country can be expected to lead to a weaker bargaining position for labour. However, there are hopes that these companies may, under certain circumstances, transfer good employment practices from their home countries. This...

This paper analyzes the reaction of teachers` and doctors` unions to a series of social sector reforms in the region, including administrative decentralization, provider payment mechanisms, and the introduction of performance evaluation and private provision. It combines the literature of...

During the 1990s, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) were adopted by countries across Latin America as central elements of their poverty reduction strategies. Alongside other developments in the area of social assistance, CCTs represent an opportunity for countries to develop an integrated and...

Latin America is a volatile, crisis-prone region, with limited and inadequate social insurance. Therefore, the long-term as well as the recent poor suffer significantly during crises. Furthermore, social spending is procyclical in the region, but less so than total spending, indicating that the...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

This paper surveys evidence on discrimination in Latin America and shows that there is a widespread perception of discrimination, especially against the poor, the uneducated and those who lack connections. The channels through which discrimination occurs may be built on the basis of economic...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...