The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence by Luis Bértola and José Antonio Ocampo (review)

This textbook is a wonderful addition to the works already available on Latin American economic history. In particular, it complements in a particularly useful way the major work of Bulmer-Thomas and the edited collections of Cárdenas, Ocampo, and Thorp, as well as the Cambridge Economic History of Latin America. It will be especially welcomed by undergraduates reading economics and economic history, although the extensive use of economic theory and statistics may be off putting to some historians.

The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 is a lucid overview of “Latin America in the world economy, 1810–2010,” an encyclopedic summary of the region’s economic performance during the last 200 years. The second chapter covers the period from 1810 to 1870, an era of independence and state formation. Chapter 3 covers the so-called period of export-led growth during the 1870s–1920s, including the “first” globalization. The next chapter is about the period of “State-led industrialization” (1930s–1970s), in which there are convincing arguments about the inappropriateness of using the term “import-substitution industrialisation” to refer to the development strategy adopted during this period. Next in turn is a suggestive chapter entitled “Turning back to the market,” which covers the 1980s–2000s. Finally, Chapter 6 draws conclusions and briefly lays out the main challenges the region now faces.

On the whole, the most salient virtues of the book are: the wealth of statistical information on a wide range of topics, in particular when they are used to highlight the region’s achievements, as well as its failings, including the new data on per capita GDP using Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean databases; the permanent contribution to the analysis of social indicators in a meaningful way (in particular changes in inequality); the examination of the economic implications of changes in institutions (positive and negative); the authors’ synthesis of the region’s last 200 years of economic history in a single and meaningful volume; the analysis of the handling of the debt crisis of the 1980s; the conceptual robustness of the arguments; and the comparative approach across the region, as well as the comparisons drawn with other countries at a similar level of development.

All this said, I have some minor issues with this book. First, and of interest for this journal’s readers, there is little mention of entrepreneurs and private firms within this book. Indeed, there is no reference to the works of important business historians working on Latin American history such as Barbero, Bucheli, Dávila, Musacchio, or Miller. If you are trying to explain the main trends in the economic development of Latin America, then the role played by entrepreneurs and private firms must be taken into account, in particular when international comparisons are drawn, as the authors effectively do in this book for most other variables. For example, the authors argue several times that the region has failed to develop national innovative systems, but no mention is made of the role firms and entrepreneurs did or could have played in this task. Likewise, there is nothing on varieties of capitalism (and therefore of Ben Schneider’s works on this topic, applied to Latin America), there is little on foreign multinationals and on the role played by native economic groups or the recent emergence of multilatinas (except for brief mentions in passing on pages 222 and 231), which is a pity. This is of consequence because one of the four main emphases of this book, according to the authors themselves, is the degree of inequality existing in Latin America. The high concentration of wealth in a handful of economic groups is both a fact to highlight and also an important characteristic of the region, even if compared to other developing countries. Second, at times the tables in the book (and there are plenty of...