Journal ArticleDOI
Inequality, Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America
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TLDR
The authors examines three recent historical approaches to the political economy of Latin America's relative economic backwardness and locates the origins of contemporary underdevelopment in defective colonial institutions linked to inequality, but argues that they did not arise from colonial inequalities, but from the adaptation of Iberian practices to the American colonies under conditions of imperial weakness.Abstract:
This essay examines three recent historical approaches to the political economy of Latin America's relative economic backwardness. All three locate the origins of contemporary underdevelopment in defective colonial institutions linked to inequality. The contrasting view offered here affirms the significance of institutional constraints, but argues that they did not arise from colonial inequalities, but from the adaptation of Iberian practices to the American colonies under conditions of imperial weakness. Colonial inequality varied across the Americas; while it was not correlated with colonial economic performance, it mattered because it determined the extent of elite resistance to institutional modernisation after independence. The onset of economic growth in the mid to late nineteenth century brought economic elites to political power, but excluding majorities as inequality increased restrained the region's twentieth-century growth rates and prevented convergence.read more
Citations
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MonographDOI
State building in Latin America
TL;DR: 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 as mentioned in this paper, and the second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Colonial Origins of the Divergence in the Americas: A Labor Market Approach
TL;DR: The authors introduced the Americas in the Great Divergence debate by measuring real wages in various North and South American cities between colonization and independence, and comparing them to Europe and Asia, finding that for much of the period, North America was the most prosperous region of the world, while Latin America was much poorer.
Journal ArticleDOI
Latin America Management Research: Review, Synthesis, and Extension
Charlene L. Nicholls-Nixon,Jose Antonio Davila Castilla,Julian Sanchez Garcia,Martha Rivera Pesquera +3 more
TL;DR: The first literature review of Latin America management research is presented in this paper, where the authors examine the contextual dimensions that make Latin America distinctive and present a framework and research agenda to guide future efforts at theory development in the Latin American context.
Posted ContentDOI
Homogeneous middles vs. heterogeneous tails, and the end of the ‘Inverted-U’: the share of the rich is what it's all about
TL;DR: The authors examined the current global scene of within-nations distributional disparities and concluded that the statistical evidence for the "upward" side of the "Inverted-U" between inequality and income per capita seems to have vanished, as many low and low-middle income countries now have a distribution of income similar to that of most middle-income countries (other than those of Latin America and Southern Africa).
ReportDOI
History without Evidence: Latin American Inequality since 1491
TL;DR: The persistence view is based on an historical literature which has made little or no effort to be comparative Modern analysts see a more unequal Latin America compared with Asia and the rich post-industrial nations and then assume that this must always have been true as discussed by the authors.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Real wages inequality and globalization in Latin America before 1940
TL;DR: The authors used 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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tallest in the World: Native Americans of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century
TL;DR: This paper used anthropometric data originally collected by Franz Boas to show that the equestrian Plains nomads were the tallest in the world during the mid-nineteenth century, and link this extraordinary achievement to a rich and varied diet, modest disease loads other than epidemics, a remarkable facility at reorganization following demographic disasters, and egalitarian principles of operation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Railroads, Landholding, and Agrarian Protest in the Early Porfiriato
TL;DR: In the last decades of the nineteenth century, railroads accounted for more than half of all British and United States investments in Latin America until well after the turn of the century.
Journal ArticleDOI
Stature in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro: preliminary evidence from prison records
TL;DR: A pesquisa mostra que houve mudancas significativas nas alturas de presos ao longo do tempo e em funcao de sua cor e nacionalidade.
Journal ArticleDOI
When the State is Untrustworthy: Public Finance and Private Banking in Porfirian Mexico
Noel Maurer,Andrei Gomberg +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the commitment problem of sovereign governments: how can they promise to honor their own agreements? The standard solutions involve reputation or political institutions capable of tying the government's hands, and they do not know much about cases where the government makes such a deal and then reneges.