Learning, Policy Making, and Market Reforms

In the 1980s and 1990s, market reforms swept the world. It is widely believed that the reformist wave can be partly explained in terms of the lessons learned from policy failures of the past. Whereas this interpretation of events is well established, it has never been empirically proved. Learning and Market Reforms is the first study that tests the impact of policy learning on economic policy choices across time and space. The study supports the popular explanation that on average, governments around the world adopted privatization and trade liberalization, and sustained open capital accounts, as a result of learning from the experience of others.

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.