Daniel S Leon

This study assesses international migration trends in 28 Caribbean countries from 2000 to 2020 and discusses the implications of these trends for different aspects of sustainable development in the subregion. It is well-documented that the Caribbean is a subregion that has exhibited net emigration, but this trend has intensified over the last two decades, with Global North regions representing the main destination of Caribbean emigrants. Although immigration to the Caribbean increased from 2000
to 2020, this increase was less substantial than that recorded for emigration from the subregion. By 2020, intra-Caribbean migration stocks accounted for just over half of all immigration stocks in the subregion, showing growing intra-Caribbean mobility of persons.

International migration trends in the Caribbean, particularly emigration from the subregion, have implications for the subregion’s sustainable development, and these are reflected in indicators such as international financial flows, demographic dynamics, and labour productivity. In general, the high net emigrant stock of the Caribbean directly correlates with remittance inflows to the subregion. Furthermore, many countries of the subregion with ageing populations stand to gain from increased  immigration as it rejuvenates their labour forces. However, with highly skilled labour constituting a large and growing proportion of the net emigrant stocks, the resulting brain drain in the Caribbean could have a more profound impact on the sustainable development of the subregion. Available data showed that most countries with net emigration during the period covered by this study experienced negative or stagnant labour productivity levels.

Considering the importance of quality data in assessing international migration trends, it is pertinent to collect, analyse, and disseminate international migration data in the Caribbean following international standards and best practices to facilitate optimal use of the subregion’s international migration statistics. This study has revealed some advances and gaps among Caribbean countries in producing international migration data. Some Caribbean countries have included questions on international migration in their national censuses, household surveys, and labour force surveys. Nevertheless, gaps remain in collecting international migration indicators, especially those related to labour and international university student mobility. Leveraging administrative data, inter-agency coordination, and international cooperation can help countries improve the collection of international migration data, thereby enhancing national statistical capacity in the Caribbean.

Recognizing the importance of unpaid work is critical to achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, which is Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Like most SDGs that are focused on the people dimension of the 2030 Agenda, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed some of the gains made in gender equality and women’s empowerment. Following the onset of COVID-19, many women have been forced to devote greater time to unpaid work activities, the extent of which has not been previously well-documented in the Caribbean. In this study, we evaluate how women and men allocated their time to different unpaid work in the household during the pandemic to gain a better understanding of the pattern of change in time-use in times of shocks and to inform the formulation of appropriate policy responses. Using data from a Rapid Gender Assessment Survey of the impacts of COVID-19 in the Caribbean, we found that women, especially those who work in the services sector, were more impacted by job losses than men. Although already overburdened with unpaid work prior to the pandemic, women spent more time in unpaid work, particularly in caring for children, than men during the pandemic. Unfortunately, there is no established system of time-use surveys in the Caribbean to provide a robust data set that could be used to establish trends in pre-pandemic use of time by women and men. The findings of the current study point to the need to conduct time-use surveys on a regular basis. In addition to providing statistics on how women and men allocate their time for different purposes, such surveys will provide insights into factors impeding women’s labour market participation in the Caribbean. Towards this end, important considerations for implementing time-use surveys are presented in this study for the consideration of National Statistical Offices of the Caribbean

I explore the relationships between macroeconomic conditions and how the forms of integration into the global economy affect homicide rates in 21 high-violence countries from 2000 to 2018. The analysis focuses on countries integrated into the global economy by accruing international economic rents. I use data from 2000 to 2018 to analyze how resource rents and remittances moderated the relationship between business cycles and high homicide rates. Moreover, I also evaluate how socioeconomic conditions mediate the above relationship. The results indicate that natural resource rents conditioned a procyclical relationship between business cycles and homicide rates. Contrastingly, remittances conditioned a countercyclical relationship between business cycles and homicide rates. The findings contribute to the rich and growing economic criminology and international political economy literature investigating how international rents condition subnational violence.

Most scholarship on major oil-producing countries (OPCs) focuses on their illiberal characteristics, but scant research explores how these regimes react to periodic oil price collapses, particularly neopatrimonial OPCs with relatively low state capacity, herein termed gatekeeper OPCs. These OPCs should be extremely vulnerable to regime change during economic crises. However, since the most recent collapse in international oil markets in 2014, almost all neo-patrimonial OPCs have managed to weather the ensuing fallout, thereby begging the question of how these seemingly vulnerable regimes manage to survive extended periods of economic crises. We hypothesise that the likelihood of regime survival in neo-patrimonial OPCs depends on a strategic calibration of domestic neopatrimonial policies, such as clientelism and executive aggrandisement, and the skilled navigation of global geopolitics. We find evidence that incumbent governments leverage international geopolitical tensions during economic crises to secure valuable foreign aid from key allies, which allows them to maintain the domestic neo-patrimonial strategies required to safeguard their power. We reached the above finding through a nested mixed-methods research design combining quantitative analysis of 35 major OPCs from 2011 to 2018 using Cox proportional hazards models with the qualitative comparison of two gatekeeper OPCs-Chad and Venezuela.

The political science literature often points to populism as the cause of democratic backsliding. The literature purports that populism undermines democracy's liberal component, meaning the horizontal checks and balances on executive power by legislatures and courts and the vertical checks and balances by civil society, such as a free press and social movements. Populists promote political polarization to build sustainable ruling coalitions during and between elections that legitimize and support the illiberal policies above. However, this debate often ignores the economic tools that populists in power possess, such as capturing direct and indirect international rents to finance clientelist mechanisms to co-opt political support. This paper contributes to the rich literature on how economic rent conditions the negative relationship between populism and liberalism by disaggregating the moderating effects of direct and indirect international rents through panel regression models in 18 Latin American countries from 1991 to 2019. I find that direct international rents, such as natural resource rents, moderated a deepening in processes of democratic backsliding. Contrastingly, indirect international rents, such as remittances, moderately mitigated democratic backsliding.

From the colonial period until the present, exit has been a
central feature of Latin American political life. This article
analyses the history of emigration regimes in Latin America
and finds that variables such as regime type, immigration
drivers and the profile of those trying to exit are key to
understanding how this practice is regulated throughout
the region. We find that in Latin America, the decision to
restrict, permit or even encourage exit has long been influenced
by the need to maximize loyalty to incumbent rule
while minimizing domestic dissent and potential hostility
from foreign exile diasporas. Authoritarian regimes have
historically fostered politically motived exit, yet demonstrate
a reluctance to permit any unsanctioned elite emigration
in order to prevent political rivals from generating
hostility abroad. By contrast, democratic regimes seldom
cause politically motivated exit in the same manner, yet
have proven uninterested in addressing economically
motivated exit because this serves to both relieve domestic
pressures while stimulating the foreign remittance
economy.

High urban violence rates have been one of the leading development challenges in Caracas, Venezuela, as its homicide rates have been higher than most other Latin American cities. However, most violence occurs in its barrios or socio-economically marginalized urban neighborhoods. This book aims to examine the structural causes of high violence rates in the barrios of Caracas while socio-economic indicators improved through qualitative comparative analysis and a political economy approach. The outcome of high violence rates under improving socio-economic conditions counters the established literature on urban violence, which shows the significance of this book. The introductory chapter discusses the structural parameter under which violence in the barrios of Caracas took place, which also frames the study’s qualitative comparative analysis. It discusses Venezuela’s dependence on oil exports since the 1920s, which generated economic rent, reduced the productivity of non-oil sectors, and increased the urbanization rate. However, the chapter shows that in the early twenty-first century, socio-economic indicators improved, thus reducing marginality or economic deprivation. A reduction of marginality should have theoretically also led to lower urban violence rates, as lower marginality should reduce the incentives of committing homicide to achieve economic and cultural goals such as accumulating resources. This book forwards social capital as a possible intervening sub-structural variable that can explain the politico-economic structural conditions–or “causes of causes”–for high violence rates in the barrios of Caracas to occur. The analysis of social capital’s intervening role can explain the theoretical puzzle of increased violence rates under improving socio-economic conditions

Multiple social and political processes of reconfiguration have taken place across Latin America in the period known as the Left Turn, from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s. Regardless of whether they experienced left-of-center governments or not, the Left Turn impacted the region's countries, and thus one can understand this period as a regional order. This introductory chapter presents the book's overarching research question: how do states and societal (national and transnational) actors trigger and shape processes of political and socioeconomic transitions in Latin America from the rise to the decline of the Left Turn. The chapter also presents the social and political transitions tackled by the book's contributing authors. This chapter discusses the two cross-cutting concepts of this volume: The actors and the liminal character of transitional processes. This discussion also explores the methodological challenges and the need for a

We analyzed the weight of political ideology in the presidential elections of 18 Latin American countries between 2015 and 2019 based on a methodological model that follows the spatial theory of voting. This model is probabilistic, which allows us to infer whether political ideology affects voters’ decisions at the polls. Our model establishes that for political ideology to be significant in a given presidential election,
one must establish two preconditions: High political polarization of parties and voters, and low changes in the party system between elections. We found that our model was valid for only in five of the studied Latin American countries, as they met the prerequisites of the model. In these countries, we were able to analyze that in Honduras and the Dominican Republic political ideology carries significant weight in explaining electoral behavior.

The rate of killings by Venezuelan security forces skyrocketed from about four kills per100,000 inhabitants in 2010 to about 26 in 2017. These statistics indicate the return of "mano dura" or heavy-handed urban security policies in Venezuela. This contribution aims to analyze the political economy of transformation at the public policy level by analyzing the institutional history of urban security policies in Venezuela. Namely, how "mano dura" as an urban security policy rises and falls depending on macroeconomic conditions. I argue that the Venezuelan state has resorted to heavy-handed security policies to offset its ability to appease working-class sectors through clientelistic measures during times of low rent windfalls. However, the severe authoritarian regression and economic downturn since the mid-2010s has contributed to a never before seen comeback of "Mano Dura" urban security policies.

This paper seeks to critically analyse the explanatory power and limitations of rentier state theory (RST) under the global condition; contributing to a gap in this concept. RST has allowed moving away from (troublesome) socio-cultural explanations of politico-economic outcomes such as the lack of democratic governance in oil-exporting countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, studies employing RST tend to follow national historical parameters to the longitudinal studies of social outcomes, which ignore the global historical dimension to what are global conditions. This paper finds that adding the global historical perspective to RST provides insight into the varying politico-economic outcomes among oil exporters like democratic governance, as it accounts for their responsiveness to their civil societies' demands and the time-space compression of rentier policies.

Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, houses almost six out of the twenty-nine million people that dwell in the South American nation. This transformation left a metropolis filled with strong and contrasting ironies such as first-world infrastructure alongside violent slums. This paper analyzed the historical influence of both French and American urbanism on Caracas during the second half of the 19 th century and the first half of the 20 th century. Especially, it examined the influence of the urban styles of Paris and New York. It achieved this by examining in detail the rise of the caudillo (dictator) era after independence and why the Francophile General Antonio Guzman Blanco transformed Caracas by importing important Parisian urban elements. Also, this paper examined why the emergence of the oil-based democratic era caused a transition from French to American urbanism, and in particular the influence of Robert Moses, the master planner of the city of New York, on the Venezuelan capital.

This book presents an overview of the problem of urban violence in Caracas, and specifically in its barrios. It helps situate readers familiar or not with Latin American in the context that is Caracas, Venezuela, a city displaying one of the world’s highest homicide rates. The book offers a qualitative comparison of the informal mechanisms of social control in three barrios of Caracas. This comprehensive analysis can help explain high homicide rates, while socio-economic conditions improved due to substantial oil windfalls in the twenty-first century. The author describes why informal social control was not effective in some barrios, and points to the role of some organizational arrangements in increasing the incentives to use violence, even under improving socio-economic conditions.

The analysis addresses a gap in the literature on violence, which mainly posits high violence rates after economic downturns. Specifically, it investigates social capital's moderating effect between Caracas' political and economic structures and high violence rates. This book concludes that perverse social capital found in the barrios of Caracas helps explain high violence rates while socio-economic indicators improved until the early 2010s. Students and researchers interested in security studies or Latin America will benefit from this book because of its extensive theoretical discussions, use of primary sources, and unique multidisciplinary analysis of urban violence.