Download or read book Social Conflict and Populist Policies in Latin America written by Jeffrey Sachs and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central hypothesis of this paper is that high income inequality in Latin America contributes to intense political pressures for macroeconomic policies to raise the incomes of lower income groups, which in turn contributes to bad policy choices and weak economic performance. The paper looks in detail at one common type of policy failure: the populist policy cycle. This particular type of Latin American policymaking, characterized by overly expansionary macroeconomic policies which lead to high inflation and severe balance of payments crises, has been repeated so often, and with such common characteristics, that it plainly reveals the linkages from social conflict to poor economic performance.