Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States
Francis Fukuyama
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0199754195
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In 1700, Latin America and British North America were roughly equal in economic terms. Yet over the next three centuries, the United States gradually pulled away from Latin America, and today the gap between the two is huge. Why did this happen? Was it culture? Geography? Economic policies? Natural resources? Differences in political development? The question has occupied scholars for decades, and the debate remains a hot one.
In Falling Behind, Francis Fukuyama gathers together some of the world's leading scholars on the subject to explain the nature of the gap and how it came to be. Tracing the histories of development over the past four hundred years and focusing in particular on the policies of the last fifty years, the contributors conclude that while many factors are important, economic policies and political systems are at the root of the divide. While the gap is deeply rooted in history, there have been times when it closed a bit as a consequence of policies chosen in places ranging from Chile to Argentina. Bringing to light these policy success stories, Fukuyama and the contributors offer a way forward for Latin American nations and improve their prospects for economic growth and stable political development.
Given that so many attribute the gap to either vast cultural differences or the consequences of U.S. economic domination, Falling Behind is sure to stir debate. And, given the pressing importance of the subject in light of economic globalization and the immigration debate, its expansive, in-depth portrait of the hemisphere's development will be a welcome intervention in the conversation.
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Prosperity,” Sarmiento offered for the first time an explicit definition of the terms that would later be used to explain the development 22 The Historical Context gap. It is true that, long before 1855, it was common to compare the achievements of neo-English America and neo-Iberian America, but these accounts invariably examined gains in the civic, cultural, and social spheres primarily, as they were considered intrinsically valuable. Sarmiento had done this in the U.S. section of his 1851
more clearly structured world economic order, in particular as providers of foodstuffs and raw materials for their North Atlantic partners. That, too, is why the issues that inspired such dark conclusions by Bolívar did not this time around lead to equally somber conclusions. The most conspicuous legacy of the conquest, which was the presence throughout most of Spanish America of an entire sector of the population whose lineage derived from the conquered peoples, did not weigh any more as the
ideologically influenced think the same way: the avocado exporter, the elderly campesino who awaits the remittances from his children, the woman who fears that if the maquiladoras are shut down she will lose her job, the globalized entrepreneurs. None of them agree with the persistent anti-U.S. sentiment embraced by the intellectual and political middle class, which rants and raves against the gringos at every opportunity, but then goes to the universities, cities, and malls of gringolandia.
punitive, almost penal, regime in an effort to make money. Such repressive efforts quickly collapsed, however, and by 1619 the company had created an unusually representative set of institutions for that era: a general assembly with adult European male suffrage. The early experience of Virginia was replicated elsewhere in the new colony. Examples include large land grants made by Charles I and, in 1632, the granting of Maryland (approximately 10 million acres) to the second Lord Baltimore. The
persistence of the political equilibrium or the consequences for economic development. However, Latin American history suggests that even this notion of institutional persistence will not provide a complete explanation. Let us return again to Bolivia. In 1952, a revolution masterminded by a political party, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), overthrew the traditional political and economic system. As in many Latin American countries, the rise of new interests and cleavages in the