ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the sweeping restructuring of the state in Latin America, a region of the world that, since the 1990s, has been highly receptive to regulatory reforms, in general, and to the creation of autonomous regulatory authorities, in particular. We present a unique dataset on the establishment and reformof regulatory agencies in 19 countries and 12 sectors since the early 1920s. Our dataset reveals an explosive growth of regulatory agencies across different sectors and nations in Latin America. From 43 agencies in 1979 (mostly in the financial sector), the overall number grew threefold to 134 by the end of 2002. In addition, although in 1979 only 21 of those agencies were nominally autonomous, the total number of nominally autonomous agencies grew almost sixfold to 119 by the end of 2002 (see Fig. 1). Although this number represents only about 60% of total potential adoptions in these countries and sectors, and in only 53% of the potential cases is there a nominal commitment to autonomy, it still represents a sweeping success for the idea of governance through regulatory authorities. A particular institutional design of regulatory governance through autono-
mous agencies that was long confined to the United States (at the country level) and central banking (at the sectoral level) is evolving from ‘‘best practice’’ to a hegemonic institution grounded in a new convention in economic governance (Levi-Faur, 2002). In fact, not one sector studied here and not one country in the region, including Cuba, has remained untouched by the process. Yet countries and sectors differ in their reception of the institutional reforms, and we aim to demonstrate that these differences shed some light on globalization as a diffusion process.
