Restructuring the state: Regulatory reform and privatization in Peru and Colombia

This dissertation examines the transformation of general and sectoral modes of governance in Peru and Colombia in the 1990s from the perspective of a conceptual framework rooted in the literature in the fields of historical comparative institutionalism, governance, and convergence/divergence. The project entails comparative case studies of the telecommunications sector—basically telephone services—that underwent massive regulatory reforms in both countries. Two principal findings were obtained. First, the research demonstrates that both countries experienced changes in economic governance, and that the state played a primordial role in the transformation of governance at the general and sectoral levels. Second, it was found that although Peru and Colombia both were subject to similar pressures for reform, the processes and results of governance transformations in diverged from one another—in the telephone sector as well as in the economy in general—significantly. This second finding challenges the mainstream comparative literature that emphasizes the similarities between both countries. In addition to conjunctural factors, the dissertation concludes that key distinctions between Peru and Colombia are best explained by cross-national differences in historical institutional arrangements with respect to state intervention in the economy.