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Structures, Endowments, and Institutions in the Economic History of Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

John H. Coatsworth
John H. Coatsworth*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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The economic history of Latin America has become more voluminous, complex, and fascinating in the past decade. The new work has already provoked noteworthy commentaries; one could even write an historiography of the historiography. The purpose of this essay is to comment on (and applaud) the re-emergence of political economy in the economic history of the region. By this I mean the renewal of interest in the Big Questions that inspired the structuralists, “cepalinos,” Marxists, dependentistas, and modernizationists of the post-World War II generations. Economic historians are again worrying about the long, long run, about the connections between social stratification, political power, and economic strategy, and about the relative impact of structures, endowments, and institutions on economic growth and development.

Type
Research Forum
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , 2005 , pp. 126 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press

References

1. Four collections of varying scope provide a representative sample: Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); John H. Coatsworth and Alan M. Taylor, eds., Latin America and the World Economy Since 1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Rosemary Thorp, ed., An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John H. Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortés Conde, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2006).

2. On this topic, see Paul Gootenberg's penetrating review essay in a recent issue of this journal: “Between a Rock and a Softer Place: Reflections on Some Recent Economic History of Latin America,” LARR 39, no. 2 (June 2004): 239–57.

3. See Angus Maddison, “Explaining the Economic Performance of Nations,” in Convergence of Productivity: Cross-National Studies and Historical Evidence, ed. William Baumol, Richard Nelson, and Edward Wolff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20–61.

4. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003), 113–50. A number of the historical estimates of GDP and GDP per capita in this source differ from estimates Maddison published earlier.

5. Maddison's figures for Mexico, for example, include GDP per capita estimates for 1820, 1850, 1870, and 1877. His estimates are based on figures published by Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI) in 1985 for 1800, 1845, 1860, and 1877, which Maddison extrapolated between these dates to produce estimates for the years he needed. INEGI's estimates were actually taken from those I published in 1978, which INEGI converted from 1970 dollars to pesos at the 1970 rate of exchange of 26.5 pesos to the dollar. Maddison divided each of INEGI's figures by exactly 2.5 to convert them from 1970 pesos to 1990 dollars. Maddison's Mexican estimates are found in Maddison, The World Economy, 191. The original estimates were published in John H. Coatsworth, “Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (February 1978): 82; the INEGI figures, which cite this source are in Estadísticas históricas de México, 2 vols (Mexico, 1985), 1:300, 311 (table 9.1).

6. For Cuba, see Pedro Fraile Balbín, Richard J. Salvucci, and Linda K. Salvucci, “El caso cubano: Exportación e independencia” in La independencia americana: Consecuencias económicas, ed. Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Samuel Amaral (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1993), part II, chap. 3. See also John H. Coatsworth, “Economic and Institutional Trajectories in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” in Latin America and the World Economy Since 1800, edited with Alan M. Taylor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 23–54.

7. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Mexican GDP per capita fell sharply during the independence wars. Partial recoveries occurred in brief periods and certain regions. See, for example, Margaret Chowning's useful study of Michoacán that argues for a recovery in agriculture (the sector least affected by Mexico's turmoil) from the late 1830s to 1845 in Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacán from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). However, there is no credible evidence in the literature to suggest that GDP per capita for the country as a whole returned to late colonial levels until the early Porfiriato.

8. Maddison, The World Economy, 263. See also the discussion in the editors' “Introduction” to Gerardo Della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor, eds., A New Economic History of Argentina (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–18. The experience of individual countries varied, of course. Argentina reaped spectacular gains up to 1913 and grew more slowly than the rest of Latin America after 1930. Mexico's productivity gains of the pre-1930 era were interrupted by the revolution of 1910, but the Mexican economy grew faster than most during the ISI era.

9. The Mexican case is representative. See INEGI, Estadísticas históricas de México, 2 vols. (Mexico: INEGI, 1985). Countries and regions of predominantly European settlement with smaller populations of indigenous or African descent tended to raise literacy and achieve improvements in health indicators more rapidly than others. For literacy rates, see Elisa Mariscal and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “Schooling, Suffrage, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Americas, 1800–1945,” in Political Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America, ed. Stephen Haber (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 165–75.

10. For an excellent recent example of this work, which makes use of an unusually large data set, see Adolfo Meisel R. and Margarita Vega A., “La estatura de los colombianos: Un ensayo de antropometría histórica, 1910–2002 (Documentos de Trabajo sobre Economía Regional 45, Centro de Estudios Regionales, Banco de la República, Cartagena, May 2004). See also Moramay López Alonso and Raúl Porras Condey, ”The Ups and Downs of Mexican Economic Growth: The Biological Standard of Living and Inequality, 1870–1950,“ Economics and Human Biology 1 (2003): 169–86. The Mexican data show a decline in heights from the 1870s to the 1920s with improvements thereafter.

11. On living standards during industrial revolutions, see John Komlos, “Shrinking in a Growing Economy: The Mystery of Physical Stature during the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (September 1998): 779–802, and Roderick Floud and Richard Steckel, eds., Health and Welfare during Industrialization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

12. On the impact of railroads on landownership in Mexico, see John H. Coatsworth, “Railroads, Landholding and Agrarian Protest in the Early Porfiriato,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 1 (February 1974): 48–71. For the Cuban case, and an interesting reinterpretation of the consequences of concentration in sugar, see Alan Dye, Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1.998); on the vast size of banana plantations, see the classic work by Charles Morrow Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold: The Story of the American Banana Trade (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1947). On the surveys and sales of public lands, see Robert H. Holden, Mexico and the Survey of Public Lands: The Management of Modernization (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994).

13. For an attempt at quantification, see John H. Coatsworth, “Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Latin America: Mexico in Comparative Perspective,” in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico, ed. Friedrich Katz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 21–62.

14. On Argentina, see the essay by Tulio Halperin Donghi, “Argentina: Liberalism in a Country Born Liberal,” in Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History, ed. Joseph L. Love and Nils Jacobsen (New York: Praeger, 1988), 99–116. See also, Lyman Johnson, “The Frontier as an Arena of Social and Economic Change: Wealth Distribution in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires Province” (Unpub. paper, n.d.).

15. In Argentina, real wages actually rose over this period, but Alan M. Taylor argues that without immigration, wages would have been 25 percent higher on the eve of World War I in “Peopling the Pampas: On the Impact of Mass Migration to the River Plate, 1870–1914,” Explorations in Economic History 34, no. 1 (1997): 100–23; see also Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Winners and Losers over Two Centuries of Globalization” (National Bureau of Economic Research, Working paper 9161 Cambridge, MA: September 2002), 17–23.

16. For a survey of the twentieth century, see Rosemary Thorp, Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chap. 13.

17. On Chile for example, see United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA or in Spanish CEPAL), Antecedentes solve el desarrollo económico de la economía chilena 1925–52 (Santiago, Chile: Pacífico, 1954); see also the two volumes on Argentina published in 1959 as part of the larger project of the entitled Análisis y proyecciones del desarrollo económico, Part V. El desarrollo económico de la Argentina, 2 vols. (Mexico: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1959).

18. Inexplicably, Stephen Haber's introductory chapter to How Latin America Fell Behind (cited above) suggests that structuralists and dependentistas were guilty of neglect and even contempt for empirical research. In this case, it was Haber who got the facts wrong. Even more sweeping, and anachronistic, was Douglass C. North's identification of “Latin American studies” with “a long tradition … [of] dependency explanations of the region's lagged growth” and the bizarre suggestion that integrating “history, economics, and politics … has not been part of … the literature on Latin American development …” in North, “Concluding Remarks: The Emerging New Economic History of Latin America,” in Haber, ed., Political Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America, 273.

19. See John H. Coatsworth and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Always Protectionist? Latin American Tariffs from Independence to Great Depression,” journal of Latin American Studies 36, no. 2 (May 2004): 205–32.

20. Sylvia Maxfield and James Nolt, “Protectionism and the Internationalization of Capital: U.S. Sponsorship of Import Substitution Industrialization in the Philippines, Turkey and Argentina,” International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 44–81.

21. See United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (Lake Success, N.Y.: CEPAL, 1950); see also Joseph Love's essay in this issue.

22. See Love's discussion of the structuralists in this issue. For a clear expression of the view, now universally accepted, that money supply determines the rate of inflation in any structural environment, see Arnold Harberger, “El problema de la inflación en América Latina,” Boletín Mensual of the Centro de Estudios Monetarios (Buenos Aires, Argentina), June 1966: 253–69.

23. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

24. On the terms of trade debate, see Christopher Blatman, Jason Hwang, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “The Terms of Trade and Economic Growth in the Periphery, 1870-1983” (Working Paper 9940 National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, August 2003).

25. See for example, the late Andre Gunder Frank's influential Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); less well known outside Latin America was the work of Ruy Mauro Marini, Dialéctica de la dependencia (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1973).

26. See the lucid discussion of Furtado in Love's essay in this issue.

27. See Coatsworth, “Trajectories.” For an econometric test for the twentieth century, see Alan M. Taylor, “On the Costs of Inward-Looking Development: Price Distortions, Growth, and Divergence in Latin America,” The journal of Economic History 58, no. 1. (March 1998): 1–28.

28. See Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Industrialization, Dependency and Power in Latin America,” Berkeley journal of Sociology 17 (1972): 79–95.

29. The term “Washington Consensus” was coined by John Williamson in a volume of papers he edited entitled Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990). The Washington Consensus in Williamson's definition included better fiscal management, deregulation of product, factor, and currency markets, privatization of public assets, and more effective governance.

30. John H. Coatsworth, Growth Against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981); William R. Summerhill, Order Against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment, and Railroads in Brazil, 1854–1913 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

31. See, for example, Richard J. Salvucci, Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An Economic History of the Obrajes, 1539–1840 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Stephen Haber, Industrialization and Underdevelopment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).

32. See, for example, Stephen Haber, “The Efficiency Consequences of Institutional Change: Financial Market Regulation and Productivity Growth in Brazil, 1866–1934,” in Latin America and the World Economy Since 1800, ed. John H. Coatsworth and Alan M. Taylor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 275–322.

33. Eduardo Lora and Ugo Panizza, “Structural Reforms in Latin America Under Scrutiny” (Research Department Working paper Washington, DC, Inter-American Development Bank, 2002).

34. See, for example, Arminio Fraga's balanced summary in “Latin America Since the 1990s: Rising from the Sickbed,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 1–18.

35. For an early discussion, see, J. L. Gallup, Jeffrey Sachs, and A. Mellinger, “Geography and Economic Development,” Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1998 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1999); for an application to Latin America, see Gerardo Esquivel, “Geografía y desarrollo económico en México” (Research Network Working Paper No. R-389 Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, D.C., April 2000). Geographic obstacles include absence of natural resources, difficult climatic conditions, distance from navigable waterways, and the like.

36. See, for example, Harold L. Cole, Lee E. Ohanian, Alvaro Riascos, and James A. Schmitz, Jr., “Latin America in the Rearview Mirror” (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 11008 Cambridge, MA, December 2004), which argues that Latin America's poor growth performance is the result of barriers to both external and domestic competition such as protectionism and barriers to entry that privilege existing producers to a far greater extent than in other world regions.

37. Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, “Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Growth Paths among New World Economies,” in Haber, ed., How America Fell Behind, 260–304.

38. Coatsworth, “Economic and Institutional Trajectories,” 29.

39. Maddison, The World Economy, 262.

40. The contrast here is to Western Europe where powerful aristocracies excluded most peasants from owning arable land, even in areas where serfdom had never developed.

41. John H. Coatsworth and Gabriel Tortella Casares, “Institutions and Long-Run Economic Performance in Mexico and Spain, 1800-2000” (Working Papers on Latin America, Paper No. 02/03–1 David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2002).

42. Stephen Haber, Armando Rozo, and Noel Maurer, The Politics of Property Rights: Political Instability, Credible Commitments, and Economic Growth in Mexico, 1876–1929 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

43. Ibid., 29. In the authors' conception, VPI is the institutionalized version of crony capitalism.

44. On the Porfirian regime's strategy to use the new bank in the service of larger policy goals, see Thomas Passananti, “Managing Finance and Financiers: The Politics of Debt, Banking and Money in Porfirian Mexico” (Unpub. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2001).

45. American Economic Review, 91, no. 5. (December 2001): 1369–405.

46. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 (November 2002): 1231–94.

47. Haber et al., Politics of Property Rights, 47.

48. Ibid., 41.

49. Ibid., 20.