Who Decides the Budget? A Political Economy Analysis of the Budget Process in Latin America

Abstract

This book analyzes the budget process in ten Latin American countries over approximately the last 25 years, stressing the role of the actors that participate in the process, their incentives, and the rules that bind their interaction. By doing so, it situates the budget process as one of the core policymaking arenas, where bargaining takes place not only for specific public goods, but also for a relevant share of the public policies of a country. Who Decides the Budget? goes a long way towards explaining how economies, institutions, and politics interact to produce budget outcomes in Latin America, a region in which informality dominates public governance.