núm. 16 (2011)

Most scholars of poverty agree that it refers to a condition in which an individual has a low income; however, their studies rarely incorporate judgments about thewelfare of those who consider themselves to be living in poverty. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the existing relationship between the concepts of poverty according to income and the concept of poverty based on people’s assessmentof their own condition, according to the information obtained from the Surveyon Quality of Life performed in Bogota for 2007. Conclusions highlight the differences and similarities between this measurement and the traditional or objective measurements.

In order to analyze this issue, this article seeks to answer the question of whether the National Planning System is a scenario aimed at promoting and strengthening participatory democracy, civic participation and facilitating democratic governance or if, by contrast, it remains a utopia, as when it was included in the Constitution of 1991. It is suggested that, during its first yearsof life, this System provided certain clues of being an efficient mechanism todynamize the relationship between the community and the Government in terms of the construction of public policies and making decisions to improve the living standards of the population; however, its role was minimized during the period from 2002 to 2010, and so it went from an initial moment of growth and splendor, to a moment of cooptation. In order to prove the hypothesis, the authors rely on concepts such as participatory democracy, citizen participation, utopia, cooptation, and democratic governance. These are analyzed and discussed with the opinions by members and former members of the National Planning Council and the District Planning Board, who were interviewed for the purposes of this article.

Latin America is a region characterized by inequalities of all kinds. They are seen as a by product of the development process and, in this sense, it would be expected for development to be self-correcting at an advanced stage. By using the tools of the new institutional economics, this paper suggests that the distributive results of a society are not the consequences of the market, which will eventually self-regulate. The institutional structure that determines the kindof equality enjoyed by a society is the choice of those with the political power to do so. They do it consciously, by calculating the consequences of their actions.The conditions for certain types of economic and political institutions are analyzed, which provides a clearer idea of the non-randomness nature of the current economic inequality. The explanation provided in this article supports the thesis that the choices made by individuals within the powerful political elite have created the current state of distributive problems.

The value of urban land is determined according to location and environment variables, as its price increases at the same rate that access to major roads, tradecenters and urban services increases. However, the pursuit of distinction, expressed as a preference for socio-economic segregation, is another variable that has an impact on this value. This paper aims to prove that this preference is a significant variable in determining the value of residential urban land, using the distance to the socioeconomic levels as a proxy variable of the preference for segregation, and estimating a hedonic model by using spatial econometric tools. It is found that there is indeed a significant connection between the value per square meter of urban land and the distance of a home to the different socioeconomic levels. The farther it is from levels 1, 2 and 3, and the closer it is to levels 4, 5 and 6, the higher the value per square meter of ground.

This document presents an argumentative summary of the regional approach to development as an interpretation of the spatial dynamics of globalization, which makes the difference with the old category of regional development analysis that prevailed until the nineties in the 20th century. The goal is to recover the meaning of the spatial categories and the points of reference of globalization’s deployment with which the studies and exercises for the formulation of regional-urban planning methodologies are elaborated. The political economy and economic geography theories are used to demonstrate that what is regional is a spatial analysis category aimed at studying men’s experience and recognition of space, as a way to represent the trajectories and spatial configurations of processes and social relations, as well as the symbolic representations that shape the identity of a space, place or territory, understood as moments of the social production and presentation of both individual and collective action, or of social relations of production.

The business cycle was one of the most important issues in the economic agendafrom the late 19th Century to the mid 20th Century. The importance of the studylay in the priority of finding the causes and duration of economic crisis, and tobe able to determine or predict how often they would happen. Currently, and with the recent financial crisis in the United States (2008) and in Colombia(1998-2009), among others, this study has gained importance once more. Thispaper presents a number of points of view on the matter and focuses on an approach that has been given very little consideration: Michal Kalecki’s theory,which provides a basis for analyzing the Colombian business cycle from 1980to 2005, and thus compare the model estimated through the Three-Stage LeastSquares (3SLS) method with the behavior of the remuneration to capital during the same period. Based on this, a close relation is found between the latter, the decision to invest and, therefore, the declining phase of the business cycle.

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the transcendence of work policies in Colombia. Aiming to accomplish this objective, a review is made of the reasons suggested for the design and evaluation of active policies to generate employment in local governments, based on the endogenous development approach. In order to illustrate the importance of these new actions in the jobmarket, the experience of four municipalities from the Aburrá Valley in Antioquia is used to evidence a higher interest by local authorities in playing a more active role in solving the issue of unemployment, despite the lack of a proper framework to ensure highly effective actions in matters related to employment.

Territories are a human construction, which appears as people inhabit them. In other words, they are generated by the existence of societies, when they transform geographies into their own habitats. Thus, both public and private actors have a chance to organize their communications, interactions and conflicts with the purpose of fulfilling their own needs and desires. As such, they concur with general concepts of social science and governance as a scenario for making public decisions, as well as for productivity and competitiveness as fundamental variables of private actions and deliberate public actions, which usually develop into development policies, consensus by agents, as well as public and private agencies in pursuit of a common goal. On this basis, this paper seeks to formulate an academic space that intends to contribute to an integrated and sustainable human development in a perspective that assumes social change, respect for the fragile ecosystem balance, and the basis of sustainability of social and economic processes from the perspective of the government and the social responsibilities of companies and citizens.