The burgeoning sector of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Latin America--funded by Northern donors--is both catalyzing and responding to change, as states, market, and civil society realign in an age of information technology and globalization. The political economic perspective of this book clarifies the emerging role of Latin America's NGOs in the global community. After introducing the expanding role of NGOs in the international community at large, the book explores the history of NGOs in Latin America. It then uses case studies to examine the economics and politics of NGOs vis-a-vis information, partnerships, opportunism, entrepreneurship, and compromise with donors.

As producers of international public goods, NGOs are characterized as building blocks of the global community and as contributors to economic production, employment, institutional innovation, and technology transfer. This book concludes that although NGOs cannot substitute for government, they are aptly suited for complex partnerships with both domestic and international public and private sectors and are more appropriate vehicles for donor projects than Latin America's public sectors.

Although land reform in Latin America has long been heralded by scholars and development economists, as well as by revolutionaries, as the essential ingredient for economic growth, the results of actual land reform projects have been largely disappointing. This book attempts to identify the reasons for these results by analyzing some of the microeconomic factors underlying the inadequate performance of reform sector agriculture. Basing her analysis on a detailed case study of agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, Meyer deals specifically with the organizational structure of the reform project itself, evaluating the relative efficiency of associative, individual, and collective organizational structures.

Meyer begins by providing both a comprehensive survey of the issues surrounding agrarian reform projects in Latin America and an introduction to the history, land settlement patterns, and agriculture of the Dominican Republic. The following chapters detail the history and institutional structure of agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, review the literature relevant to the study of reform sector projects, and offer case studies of particular reform projects. The author then develops original microeconomic models to explore the implications of the individual, collective, and associative organizational structures. Taken as a whole, Meyer's study provides both theoretical and empirical evidence to support the superior efficiency of the associative organizational structure over either the individual or collective farming approach in the Dominican Republic.

The burgeoning sector of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Latin America--funded by Northern donors--is both catalyzing and responding to change, as states, market, and civil society realign in an age of information technology and globalization. The political economic perspective of this book clarifies the emerging role of Latin America's NGOs in the global community. After introducing the expanding role of NGOs in the international community at large, the book explores the history of NGOs in Latin America. It then uses case studies to examine the economics and politics of NGOs vis-a-vis information, partnerships, opportunism, entrepreneurship, and compromise with donors. As producers of international public goods, NGOs are characterized as building blocks of the global community and as contributors to economic production, employment, institutional innovation, and technology transfer. This book concludes that although NGOs cannot substitute for government, they are aptly suited for complex partnerships with both domestic and international public and private sectors and are more appropriate vehicles for donor projects than Latin America's public sectors.