Rara Avis: Latin American populism in the 21st century

Luciano Campos () and Agustin Casas ()

European Journal of Political Economy, 2021, vol. 70, issue C

Abstract: Since the beginning of the 21st century, many Latin American countries have been ruled by governments characterized as populist (the so-called new Latin American Left). We focus on the macroeconomic implications of the policies adopted by these governments (instead of their leaders’ rhetoric) and we investigate to what extent this characterization holds. In particular, we focus on their wage policies by doing a Structural Vector Autoregressive analysis and assuming that populist shocks have no long-run effects on real wages. This identification implies that populist leaders prioritize redistribution through nominal wages disregarding the evolution of productivity. The results indicate that economic populism is not as widespread as previously thought. Instead, our approach leads to more nuanced results: while we find that there is populism in Argentina, the results for Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador show only sporadic populist events. In the remaining countries, we do not find persistent economic populism.

Keywords: Macroeconomics of populism; Income redistribution; Structural VAR; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 E64 H11 N36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Rara Avis: Latin American populism in the 21st century (2020)
Working Paper: Rara Avis: Latin American populism in the 21st century (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:70:y:2021:i:c:s0176268021000422

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2021.102042

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