The question of development is a major topic in courses across the social sciences and history, particularly those focused on Latin America. Many scholars and instructors have tried to pinpoint, explain, and define the problem of underdevelopment in the region. With new ideas have come new strategies that by and large have failed to explain or reduce income disparity and relieve poverty in the region. Why Latin American Nations Fail brings together leading Latin Americanists from several disciplines to address the topic of how and why contemporary development strategies have failed to curb rampant poverty and underdevelopment throughout the region. Given the dramatic political turns in contemporary Latin America, this book offers a much-needed explanation and analysis of the factors that are key to making sense of development today.

How a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world. After the Second World War demolished the old order, a group of economists and policymakers from across Latin America imagined a new global economy and launched an intellectual movement that would eventually capture the world. They charged that the systems of trade and finance that bound the world’s nations together were frustrating the economic prospects of Latin America and other regions of the world. Through the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL, the Spanish and Portuguese acronym, cepalinos challenged the orthodoxies of development theory and policy. Simultaneously, they demanded more not less trade, more not less aid, and offered a development agenda to transform both the developed and the developing world. Eventually, cepalinos established their own form of hegemony, outpacing the United States and the International Monetary Fund as the agenda setters for a region traditionally held under the orbit of Washington and its institutions. By doing so, cepalinos reshaped both regional and international governance and set an intellectual agenda that still resonates today. Drawing on unexplored sources from the Americas and Europe, Margarita Fajardo retells the history of dependency theory, revealing the diversity of an often-oversimplified movement and the fraught relationship between cepalinos, their dependentista critics, and the regional and global Left. By examining the political ventures of dependentistas and cepalinos, The World That Latin America Created is a story of ideas that brought about real change.

Latin America’s economic performance is mediocre at best, despite abundant natural resources and flourishing neighbors to the north. The perplexing question of how some of the wealthiest nations in the world in the nineteenth century are now the most crisis-prone has long puzzled economists and historians. The Decline of Latin American Economies examines the reality behind the struggling economies of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. A distinguished panel of experts argues here that slow growth, rampant protectionism, and rising inflation plagued Latin America for years, where corrupt institutions and political unrest undermined the financial outlook of already besieged economies. Tracing Latin America’s growth and decline through two centuries, this volume illustrates how a once-prosperous continent now lags behind. Of interest to scholars and policymakers alike, it offers new insight into the relationship between political systems and economic development.

The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century - without much success. The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on the development and contemporary outcome of those state and nation-building projects.

What role does war play in political development? Our understanding of the rise of the nation-state is based heavily on the Western European experience of war. Challenging the dominance of this model, Blood and Debt looks at Latin America's much different experience as more relevant to politics today in regions as varied as the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa. The book's illuminating review of the relatively peaceful history of Latin America from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries reveals the lack of two critical prerequisites needed for war: a political and military culture oriented toward international violence, and the state institutional capacity to carry it out. Using innovative new data such as tax receipts, naming of streets and public monuments, and conscription records, the author carefully examines how war affected the fiscal development of the state, the creation of national identity, and claims to citizenship. Rather than building nation-states and fostering democratic citizenship, he shows, war in Latin America destroyed institutions, confirmed internal divisions, and killed many without purpose or glory.

Analysis of Latin America's economy focusing on development, covering the colonial roots of inequality, boom and bust cycles, labor markets, and fiscal and monetary policy. Latin America is richly endowed with natural resources, fertile land, and vibrant cultures. Yet the region remains much poorer than its neighbors to the north. Most Latin American countries have not achieved standards of living and stable institutions comparable to those found in developed countries, have experienced repeated boom-bust cycles, and remain heavily reliant on primary commodities. This book studies the historical roots of Latin America's contemporary economic and social development, focusing on poverty and income inequality dating back to colonial times. It addresses today's legacies of the market-friendly reforms that took hold in the 1980s and 1990s by examining successful stabilizations and homemade monetary and fiscal institutional reforms. It offers a detailed analysis of trade and financial liberalization, twenty–first century-growth, and the decline in poverty and income inequality. Finally, the book offers an overall analysis of inclusive growth policies for development—including gender issues and the informal sector—and the challenges that lie ahead for the region, with special attention to pressing demands by the vibrant and vocal middle class, youth unemployment, and indigenous populations.

Hofman, a researcher with the Chile-based Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, uses growth accounting methods and previously unavailable long-term series data to assess the economic performance of the region during the century from a comparative and historical perspective. In particular he compares Latin American economies to those of advanced capitalist economies, to newly industrialized economies, and to Spain and Portugal because of the historical ties. He looks at the reasons for the poor or negative growth during the 1980s and the apparent recovery in the 1990s and at such problems as debt, income inequality, high inflation, cyclical instability, and political and policy instability. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Originally published: Monthly Review Press, 1967.

Workers' remittances have become a major source of financing for developing countries and are especially important in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is at the top of the ranking of remittance receiving regions in the world. While there has been a recent surge in analytical work on the topic, this book is motivated by the large heterogeneity in migration and remittance patterns across countries and regions, and by the fact that existing evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean is restricted to only a few countries, such as Mexico and El Salvador. Because the nature of the phenomenon varies across countries, its development impact and policy implications are also likely to differ in ways that are still largely unknown. This book helps fill the gap by exploring, in the specific context of Latin America and Caribbean countries, some of the main questions faced by policymakers when trying to respond to increasing remittances flows. The book relies on cross-country panel data and household surveys for 11 Latin American countries to explore the development impact of remittance flows along several dimensions: growth, poverty, inequality, schooling, health, labor supply, financial development, and real exchange rates.

No one in Latin American historiography has paid more attention to questions related to the emergence of nations than Jose Carlos Chiaramonte. Reflecting on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century uses of the concept of nation in Europe and the Americas, Chiaramonte argues that historical questions related to the term "nation" derive from its changing meaning in different contexts. The historian would be better advised to focus on the development of forms of state organization, and the emergence of national states, rather than the "nation" as a cultural community prior to independence.Nation and State in Latin America begins by examining the effects on historians of the ideological and methodological prejudice spread by contemporary nationalism on the historical studies of Latin America. Chiaramonte analyzes uses of concepts such as "nation" and "state" in both Europe and the Americas. Chiaramonte considers the prominence of sovereign "pueblos" (cities and townships) and their role during independence. He argues the non-existence of nationalities in the period and proves that feelings of collective identity at that time amounted mainly to local affections.He concludes with an analysis of major trends in federalism and the law of nature and nations, crucial to understanding the political concepts of the age of birth of modern Latin American nations. This book covers the whole of Latin America, making use of comparative viewpoints. The different national intonations of the concept of sovereignty and the nuances of the federal and confederate forms of the state are examined in detail.