Policy Transfer and Lesson Drawing. The Case of the Pension System Reform in Mexico1
| Autor | Moreno, Jorge Enrique Culebro |
Introduction
This article has two purposes, firstly to contribute to the understanding of the key features and potential paradoxes posed by the implementation of public -private partnerships (ppp), generally conceived as co-operation schemes between public and private complementary and interdependent, aimed at providing a public service or as a set of networks involving a variety of public and private actors (Koch and Buser, 2006); secondly, to strengthen the research literature and development of and pension regulators from a transfer of public policies. In this sense, we are interested in the reforms of pension systems in Latin America and, in particular in some strategies, such as those followed in Chile and Mexico, and by which regulatory frameworks have been introduced to monitor some elements of market.
During the 1990s, several Latin American countries were immersed in the fiscal crisis and in response to it, prompted a series of reforms that varied in scope and depth, many of them as part of commitments to international agencies to change financial support. Others were inspired by some kind of fashion to make governments more efficient and responsive known as New Public Management and who have been transforming the social security systems in most of the world (Askim, Christensen, Fimreite, and Laegreid, 2010).
For some Latin American countries, these ideas served to guide the reforms of their pension systems. In particular, this article focuses on the 1997 reform of the Mexican pension system, in particular on the analysis of the regulatory agency created (Comisión Nacional de Ahorro para el Retiro, consar) and a pension fund administrator designed as a public-private partnership (Administrador de Fondos para el Retiro, Afore xxi).
While administrative reforms have been designed primarily as rational strategies, we argue that reforms might be better when they are seen as a mixture of internal and external institutional features, because they are embedded in a specific political and administrative context (Christensen, Laegreid, and Stigen, 2004). In general, this type of reform is oriented to the introduction of economic principles from the new institutionalism in economics in the public sector, as well as the implementation of managerial tools closest to organizational new institutionalism. In other words, we refer to the study of the learning processes as a model that emphasizes how reforms are influenced by national administrative cultures, traditions, and the political context (Christensen and Lagreid, 2007a, 2007b), but also to the study of new and useful perspectives for public management.
In accordance with the new public management discourse, public organizations tend to develop a set of networks where a mixed collection of players in private, public and voluntary sectors, improve the governmental performance. Public-private partnerships have also become a form of structural devolution which involves a transfer of tasks from the central government to the private sector (Christensen and Laegreid, 2007a). Thus, under the new public management context, public-private partnerships contain at least three elements: 1) preference for private finance because of the problems related to technical capacity for the public officials; 2) complexity, which may reduce transparency, accountability and access to information; and 3) specific accountability and governance mechanisms, such as risk-sharing and flexible decision making processes (Hodge, 2007).
In this article, we focus on the exception, Afore xxi, which is the only publicly owned pension fund administrator. It is part of the Mexican Institute for Social Security (imss for its initials in Spanish); the institution is responsible of providing social security services to workers in the formal sector. The staff and management of Afore XXI are both public but it competes with the private Afores in equal conditions. It provides services as a private agency, and is subject to the regulation of the CONSAR.
The lesson-drawing or policy transfer perspective, explains reforms and their outcomes as a constructive learning process, which draws experience from other countries to improve national policies. It tries to respond under what circumstances and to what extent will a program that works there will work here (Rose, 2001) and entails different stages: diagnosing the problem and searching for a relevant program to imitate; abstracting a cause-and-effect model; designing and creating a lesson; and, handling the problem of context and carrying out a prospective evaluation. Thus, lesson drawing/policy transfer implies a process of editing, filtering, interpreting and transforming policies, and suggests that evaluations should be carried out to measure the effectiveness of the public programs and the transferred model into the political system. This perspective also highlights the role international organizations have in promoting and introducing administrative reforms. In this regard, the article emphasizes the manner in which the institutional context influenced the development and evolution of one part of the reform to the pension system in México as a part of a whole social welfare reform (Culebro, 2008).
Theoretically speaking the article draws from a combination of a lesson drawing model, policy transfer, and an institutional perspective it is intended to explore two ideas:
* The regulatory scenario. In line with new public management prescriptions and major structural reforms, an appropriate development of public-private partnership would call for less regulation. However, in practice, regulation tends to increase and becomes more complex, because it combines rules from both the public and the private spheres;
* The institutional design scenario. Regulatory agencies should be responsible for the regulation of public -private partnerships. However, it has been acknowledged that the institutional design of the regulatory agencies has important effects on the functioning and outcomes of public-private partnerships, such as lack of accountability, transparency, and coordination within the public sector.
These scenarios are part of a collection of a new institutional arrangement that are the result of the introduction of a set of administrative and regulatory reforms in which, instead of integration of the participants in the financial system, we find fragmentation mainly due to horizontal specialization; the financial system has become more complicated than before because of its existence. In addition, concerning the institutional design of the regulatory agencies as a substitute of obtaining technical and efficiency gains from the reform, lack of accountability and transparency are now significant issues; as well as public servants are confused about their roles because competing values guide their activities (e.g., efficiency and legitimacy).
Methodological considerations
The text assumes that there are two major research strategies: quantitative and qualitative methods and that, when it comes to analyze the process of administrative reform qualitative, methods provide data whose treatment...
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