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.