Trade policy making in Latin America: a compared analysis

Includes bibliography

Financial crisis and national policy issues: an overview

Includes bibliography

Brazil's new national policy on solid waste: challenges and opportunities

Brazil, one of the world's largest developing countries, has recently introduced a new solid waste management regulatory policy. This new regulatory policy will have implications for a wide variety of stakeholders and sets the stage for opportunities and lessons to be learned. These issues are discussed in this article. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Population and development planning: some notes on the policy- making capacities of the state in Latin America; preliminary draft

Includes bibliography

Integrating gender into macroeconomic policy and The use of gender indicators in public policy-making.

This issue of the Gender Dialogue focuses on two programmatic areas of ECLAC’s work over recent years, namely (i) integrating gender into macroeconomic policy and (ii) the use of gender indicators in public policy-making. In its work on integrating gender into macroeconomic policy, the ECLAC Subregional Headquarters for the Caribbean conducted a study to determine the capacity of economic planning units in selected countries of the subregion to integrate gender into the macreconomic planning process and the findings are highlighted below. The study is intended to assist in the development of a training agenda for Caribbean economic planners and others involved in the formulation of macroeconomic policy. Further, as part of a wider ECLAC project on the use of gender indicators in public policy–making, a database of gender indicators for the Caribbean has been created and the broad elements of the database are also presented in this issue.

Switzerland: Think Tanks and Vested Interests in Swiss Policy Making

This paper analyses the role of think tanks in Swiss policy making. Starting from the relationship between interest groups and the state, which has been shaping Swiss policy making for a long time, we hypothesize that these structures offer good possibilities for scientific arguments and ideas to influence the process of policy making. Our observations from a recent example indeed illustrates that think tanks can use the same channels as vested interests to bring in their know-how. Furthermore, we conclude that the characteristics of the political system, e.g. direct democracy and the consensual alignment particularly influence the chances of think tanks to intervene. In this exchange vested interests and think tanks do not really interfere with each other, but rather they complement each other both having.