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How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914. Edited by Stephen Haber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp.xi + 315. $18.95. ISBN 0 8047 2738 4
A central concern of the collection of essays, How Latin America Fell Behind, as noted by its editor Stephen Haber, is to provide an explanation for the relative economic backwardness of Brazil and Mexico from the perspective of neo-classical growth theory. As such, says Haber, the contributions draw inspiration from the example provided by the 'New Economic History' carried out in the United States by such notables as Easterlein, Engerman, Fogel, and Gallman. Each of these scholars, not coincidentally. have in common that they were students of Simon Kuznets, one of the pioneers in empirical growth economics.
As claimed by Haber an additional and 'most important' thematic thread running through the essays is their rejection of dependency theory as a useful analytic framework for understanding Latin America's (Brazil and Mexico) underdevelopment in the nineteenth century. This rejection must however be considered at best an implicit one since, outside of Haber's introductory chapter, the issue of dependency theory's past or continuing relevance is scarcely raised in the book. Haber's own unoriginal critique of dependency theory actually seems out of place in the collection. While the contributions cannot be said to be written from an explicitly dependency perspective, I do not find anything in them that undermines the approach and some things that actually provide support for it.
I would prefer to identify the unifying theme of the essays as consisting in their emphasis on the important contribution made by institutions to economic growth. In particular. large stress is...