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very poor. Individuals in rural areas have hard time accessing education and health and are outside of the formal pension system. Public assistance safety nets are often implemented through community involvement, which also excludes the rural poor and urban indigents. In the final chapter, Alesina, Carrasquilla, and Roberto Steiner write about the Central Bank, its improvement in terms of independence after the Constitutional reform of 1991, and the desirability for yet more independence. The authors find that the main points of conflict are that the treasury minister is the president and a voting member of the Central Bank board, and that the government is involved in exchange rate policies (and thus monetary policy) and the management of the financial system. Criticisms and proposals are in line with current views and trends on central bank independence. Summing up, the book covers a great deal of topics from a perspective of diagnosing and prescribing. It is a study of those aspects of Colombian political and economic institutions that the editor and authors judge to be in need of reforms. The nature of the recommendations naturally varies with the nature of the problems. Most proposals related to political institutions involve a constitutional reform. Proposals affecting large influential groups, be their persuasion power legal—such as the teachers’ union—or illegal—such as drug dealers, could be harder to implement. The original drafts of the chapters have been circulating for several years and Alesina argues that several proposals have been implemented. IRENE BRAMBILLA Yale University