The Economic History of Latin America since Independence by Victor Bulmer-Thomas (Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London)
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.