As the 'Washington Consensus' reforms are losing momentum in Latin America, the Inter- American Development Bank (IDB) is calling for shifting the focus from the content of policy choices to the political process of their implementation. As this paper studies the paradigmatic case of telecommunications reform in Costa Rica it underscores the importance of these 'politics of policies'. The analysis finds, however, that the failure of repeated liberalization initiatives was not only due to policy-makers' errors in steering the project through 'the messy world of politics' (IDB); instead, as liberalization remained unpopular, policy content indeed mattered, and only the interaction of both explains the outcome. Particular attention is drawn to the political feed-back effects, as the failed reform, precisely because it had been backed by bi-partisan support, became a catalyst for the disintegration of the country's long-standing two-party system.
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Paper provided by GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in its series GIGA Working Paper Series with number
47.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E61 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination E65 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Studies of Particular Policy Episodes H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Boundaries of Public and Private Enterprise; Privatization; Contracting Out L96 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Telecommunications O54 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Latin America; Caribbean
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