REPAL will hold two panels during the next LASA conference (Chicago, May 21-24, 2014): “Is the revitalization of Latin American political economy necessary?” and “New Research Frontiers in Latin American Political Economy”.
On Friday 23, at 10am, Juan Pablo Luna (PUC Chile), Victoria Murillo (Columbia) and Andrew Schrank (University of New Mexico) will host a roundtable to discuss the current state of Latin American political economy as a field of study. Ernesto Calvo (University of Maryland), Alberto Díaz-Cayeros (Univeristy of California San Diego), Tulia Falleti (University of Pennsylvania) and Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida (Universidade de Sao Paulo) are invited to discuss the following questions: Is a political economic approach necessary or even useful? If so, what should it look like? Are contemporary political economists meeting the challenge? And, if not, what might be done about it?
The same day at 2 pm, a second panel will address the political economies of growth and distribution during Latin America’s recent commodity boom. The first two papers (Juan Pablo Luna and Victoria Murillo) will address the politics of natural resource exports in the Southern Cone in particular: Who wins? Who loses? How? And why? The remaining papers will focus on distributional questions including taxation (Tasha Fairfield, LSE, and Nora Lustig, Tulane), redistribution, and social protection (Candelaria Garay, Harvard University). Evelyn Huber as discussant will explore the intersection between the political economy of production, on the one hand, and the political economy of redistribution, on the other.