Education remains one of the biggest challenges for Latin American societies. However, the factors explaining this are hardly known, less so thoroughly understood. In Skills, Values, and Development: The Political Economy of Education in Latin America, the authors approach the education problem in 21st-century Latin America by considering it as a political economy issue. This political economy approach allows refocusing research from the supply of education (educational outcomes, institutions, and reform trajectories) in existing scholarship on policy reforms, to the conflicting demands of education by different actors at the intersection of political and economic dynamics.

The book is divided into three sections: first, the authors examine how education expansion--or the lack of it--relates to common regional political trends, how these trends relate to skills, value-orientations, and developmental goals, and the conflictual dynamics between these goals. The second section of the book explores some of these issues from a historical perspective, while the final section discusses the political economy of investing in skills in the context of the region's attempts to successfully integrate itself into the knowledge economy and build more cohesive and prosperous societies. The book combines a variety of approaches and methodologies, including short and long-term perspectives, large N quantitative analyses, comparative methods, and country case studies.