1. Introduction 2. Theory: instability, credible commitments, and growth 3. VPI coalitions in historical perspective: Mexico's turbulent politics, 1876-1929 4. Finance 5. Industry 6. Petroleum 7. Mining 8. Agriculture 9. Conclusion.

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The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876-1929

Preface.- Section 1. Methods and Models: Fire-History Reconstructions Based on Sediment Records from Lakes and Wetlands.- Simulation of Landscape Fire, Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics.- Simulation of Effects of Climatic Change on Fire Regimes.- Section 2. North America: Fire Regimes and Climatic Change in Canadian Forests.- Fires and Climate in Forested Landscapes of the US Rocky Mountains.- Tree-Ring Reconstructions of Fire and Climate History in the Sierra Nevada of California and Southwestern United States.- The Influence of Climate and Land Use on Historical Surface Fires in Pine-Oak Forests, Sierra Madre Occidental, Mexico.- Impact of Past, Present and Future Fire Regimes on North American Mediterranean Shrublands.- Section 3. South America: Fire History and Vegetation Change in Northern Patagonia, Argentina.- Influences of Climate on Fire in Northern Patagonia, Argentina.- Fire Regimes and Forest Dynamics in the Lake District of south central Chile.- Fire History in Central Chile: Tree-Ring Evidence and Modern Records.- Holocene Fire Frequency and Climate Change at Rio Rubens Bog, Southern Patagonia.- Regeneration Potential of Chilean Matorral after Fire: An Updated View.- Section 4. Practical Implications: Management Implications of Fire and Climate Changes in the Western Americas.

Fire and Climatic Change in Temperate Ecosystems of the Western Americas

State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

State building in Latin America

By 1914, there were huge economic gaps between the Southern Cone plus Cuba and the rest of Latin America. Can they be explained by the varying ability of these countries to exploit the first great globalization boom after about 1870? Or did the gaps appear much earlier? And what about the gaps between Latin America and the Mediterranean, let alone with industrial leaders like Britain? What role did geographic isolation, globalization and demographic forces play in the process? Conventional GDP estimates are much too coarse to confront these questions. This essay uses a new data base on real wages and relative factor prices for seven Latin American and three Mediterranean regions, the latter being a source of so many of immigrants for the former. These ten regions, plus comparative information from Britain and the United States, form the data base for the paper.

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Real wages inequality and globalization in Latin America before 1940

The following three articles, together with this brief introduction, review the consequences of the paradigm shift in Latin American economic historiography from structuralism to the New Institutional Economics (NIE). Joseph Love analyzes the basic tenets of structuralism, their connection to dependency, the influence of CEPAL on policymaking, and how a generation of historians utilized the methodologies of structuralism to research historical problems in Latin American development. John H. Coatsworth's contribution correlates the decline of the structuralist model to the rise of research interests in the role of institutions in economic history and examines the latest long-range comparisons of productivity between the Latin American and U.S. economies. Commenting on the recent research utilizing the NIE, Coatsworth agrees with Love that the relative economic stagnation of the past quarter century may not render structuralism entirely irrelevant. Sandra Kuntz Ficker summarizes the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools with respect to commercial policy and concludes with a discussion of how the NIE contributes to innovative research on Latin American foreign trade. These articles resulted from the authors' participation in a LARR-sponsored panel at the 2004 Latin American Studies Association Congress. 
Los siguientes tres articulos, junto a esta breve introduccion, repasan las consecuencias que el cambio de paradigma del estructuralismo a la Nueva Economia Institucional (NEI) han producido en la historiografia economica de America Latina. Joseph Love analiza los principios basicos del estructuralismo, su conexion con la teoria de la dependencia, la influencia de la CEPAL en la toma de decisiones politicas y como una generacion de historiadores utilizo las metodologias del estructuralismo para indagar los problemas historicos del desarrollo latinoamericano. En su contribucion, John H. Coatsworth relaciona el declive del modelo estructuralista con el aumento del interes academico por el rol que las instituciones tuvieron en el desarrollo de la historia economica, y examina las mas recientes comparaciones de la productividad de largo plazo de las economias latino y norteamericanas. Coatsworth coincide con Love en su vision sobre los mas recientes analisis que emplean la perspectiva de la NEI, en cuanto a que el relativo estancamiento de la economia durante el ultimo cuarto de siglo no deja al estructuralismo en una posicion irrelevante. Sandra Kuntz Ficker resume las posturas de las escuelas estructuralista y dependentista con respecto a las politicas comerciales, y concluye con una discusion acerca de la innovacion que la NEI ha generado en la investigacion sobre el comercio internacional latinoamericano. Estos articulos se originaron en la participacion de estos autores en el foro organizado por LARR en el XXV Congreso Internacional de LASA de 2004.

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William H. Beezley

Papers

Growth against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico