The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge Latin American Studies, Series Number 77)

The Economic History of Latin America seeks to explain why, despite the region's abundance of natural resources and a favourable ratio of land to labour, not a single republic of Latin America has achieved the status of a developed country after nearly two centuries free from colonial rule. Taking its narrative from the end of the colonial epoch to the early 1990s, this book provides a comprehensive, balanced portrait of the factors affecting economic progress in Latin America. This book explains the successes and failures of export-led growth in the nineteenth century, and the withdrawal, after the depression of 1929, of many countries into a model of import-substitution industrialization. The debt crisis of the 1980s effectively ended hopes for the inward-looking approach, however, and the author examines the routes through which Latin American republics pursued a new version of export-led growth.