What Makes Reforms Likely? Timing and Sequencing of Structural Reforms in Latin America

The wave of structural reforms in Latin America and elsewhere has stimulated the development of a wide body of theoretical literature on the political economy of reform, i. e. , the study of the political constraints that condition the timing, speed and sequencing of reforms. This paper tests some of the hypotheses associated with these theoretical models, using a set of structural reform indicators for approximately twenty Latin American countries for the period 1985-1995. Although there is strong support for some hypotheses, recent reforms in Latin America cannot be adequately explained without either better theories or better data