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Chile pioneered a structural reform in Latin America that privatized its public pension system and influenced similar reforms in another nine countries. Twenty-five years later, this article evaluates the macroeconomic, microeconomic, and social effects of this reform in Chile and the other countries in the region, and extracts lessons from those experiences. Fiscal costs of the reform have been high and prolonged, exceeded capital accumulation, and had a negative impact on national savings, but Chile's reform has contributed to the development of capital markets; employer's contributions were eliminated or reduced in half of the countries and the worker's share in the total contribution averages 65 per cent; competition is afflicted by a small number of administrators and a high level of concentration; administrative costs are high and stagnant; capital returns are fair but declining; portfolio diversification has been achieved only in Chile and Peru; labour-force coverage has declined in all ten countries, and gender and income inequalities have expanded.

Latin America has been a world pioneer of neoliberal, structural reform of social security pensions (‘privatisation’). This article focuses on the diverse political economy circumstances that enabled such reform, analysing why policy makers have chosen such a costly strategy and how they have managed to implement it. First, in nine countries with diverse regimes (authoritarian and democratic) it examines the internal political process that led to the adoption of reform. There tends to be an inverse relationship between the degree of democratisation and that of privatisation, but the political regime alone cannot fully explain the reform outcomes in all cases. To expand the search for explanatory variables, other key factors that might have influenced the reform design are studied, among them relevant political actors (driving and opposing forces), existing institutional arrangements, legal constraints, internal and external economics and policy legacy.

THE US POLICY OF ISOLATION OF CUBA HAS ALLOWED AN IN CREASING SOVIETIZATION AND TOTALITARIANISM OF THE CUBA REVOLUTION WITH THE CONSEQUENT CURTAILMENT OF POLITICAL AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOMS. THE NORMALIZATION OF RELATIONS COULD HELP TO GAIN SOME INDEPENDENCE FOR THE ISLAND AND MORE FREEDOM AND LESS ECONOMIC HARDSHIPS FOR ITS PEOPLE AND WOULD LEAD TO A MORE HUMANE SOCIALIST SYSTEM.

Compares the social insurance programmes of the Bahamas, Barbados and Jamaica from the standpoint of historical evolution and current administration, population coverage, financing problems, benefits available (adequacy, adjustment to inflation, differences), distribution of benefit expenditure (including assistance programmes within social insurance), administrative costs, personnel, managerial problems (eg poor communications, delays in the processing of benefits, flaws in accounting), contributions of insured persons, employers and the state, investment, and financial and actuarial equilibrium. (Abstract amended)