Public Administration As A Discipline

PPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN LATIN AMERICA
Latin America is a unique region of the world, rich of culture and heritage as well as one of the most biodiversity land but among that also face some unique issues like, top rank the most unequal distribution of wealth, and furthermore their people face extreme poverty in every country, low standards of education, poor productivity performance, lack oflaw empowerment, lax of food sovereignty, humble health care systems, unreliable democracy, public insecurity among other issues.
It is not surprising that the most developing nations in Latin America, such as Chile, Brazil or Mexico rank in the bottom of the list of the OECD countries in regards social spending per capita (see figure 1, OECD page).

During the 80’s most of the Latin Americancountries experience significant changes in the way they were structure it, from an import substitution from the 1950s until the beginning of the1980s, follow by “the lost decade” and then the liberalization of the economies in the Washington consensus in the 1990’s the results of these efforts to govern have been diverse and moreover disappointing1. The last two decades Latin America has suffer apain recovery follow by some crisis (“Tequila crisis”, “Samba effect” and “Tango effect”) and last decade was not really promising from most of the countries, such as Mexico which in 2008 the real growth of the GDP was 1.2% compare to previous year at PPP (OECD Statistics, webpage).

According to Spiller and Stein, “public policies and administration emerge from a decision-making process thatinvolves a multiplicity of political actors who interact in a variety of arenas, policymaking process carries them forward from the idea to implementation and sustains”2 them over time in order to achieve the objectives of the public administration, better outcomes upon the quality of the policymaking process over which are discussed, approved and implemented an example of that are either thepromotion of public welfare or private interests, in regards Latin America the second has been upon the first.

Furthermore, Latin America is a region which democracy is a constrain instead of a helpful weapon in society, almost all the countries have multi-party regime and this is a key factor that stop development, Mexico for instance, need a taxation and labor not to mention energy reform (whichis a more controversial topic) in order to increase tax collection and to brake the strong labor unions to be more productive but since the PAN took the presidency in 2000, efforts have been in vain because of the two opposite parties rules the majority of the congress. But even in Chile, weak in comparison to the U.S. congress, legislature is unusually professional and technically competent byLatin American standards3 but even though legislation is not easily approved and depend more on the negotiation skills of the president4.

In addition, corruption is one of the major issues in Latin America, Chile ranks among the 25 less corrupt countries in the world and is the least corrupt country in Latin America5. Brazil ranks in 73, Colombia and Peru 80, Mexico and Argentina in 100,Venezuela 172, Haiti 175 of a total of 182 countries (figure 2, transparency.org) which can be translate of a lax of governability and a lack of standardized processes that works beside the millions of dollars that the citizens need to pay in order to end a process. But corruption comes together with high levels of crime, diversion of funds, and personal interest among many other effects that hinderthe public administration.

Public Administration is something that people in Latin America usually does not got it from granted, at least not in when problems starts to come up, the only time where the government promise the “la luna y las estrellas” is the time of upcoming elections otherwise people do not believe in so. Education is a big issue and in fact is something that keep growing the...