PREFACE

Csar Yez and Albert Carreras

One decade into the twenty-first century, and thirty years since the worst economic crisis in Latin America (the debt crisis of the 1980s the lost decade), it is time to have another look at the economic history of Latin America and the Caribbean from a long-term perspective. We firmly believe that many of the ideas used to study Latin American backwardness, are twentieth-century rather than twenty-first-century ideas. In this sense, Latin American economic historiography has been marked by a period of pessimism about Latin Americas chances of overcoming economic backwardness. The tendency to take a shortterm perspective or to focus only on a few national cases has meant that research has been heavily influenced by debates centring on the failure of industrialization, the political cost of the military dictatorships, the social and economic impact of the lost decade and the limitations of the subsequent recovery. The poor performance of Latin American economies in recent times has also influenced those who study the earlier stages, which helps to understand the success of a book entitled How Latin America Fell Behind published in 1997. This backwardness is apparent in the widening gap between GDP per inhabitant in Latin America and the Caribbean and that of wealthy countries. The ideas most frequently used in an attempt to explain Latin American backwardness point to institutional reasons, on the one hand, and the theory of the curse of natural resources, on the other, or to both simultaneously. These ideas share a certain sense of doom with regards Latin Americas economic prospects: institutions inherited from centuries of colonization whose modernization is slow and barely noticeable gave way to macroeconomics of populism (to quote another influential title in Latin America) from which these countries have not been able to break free; or the abundance of natural resources distributed arbitrarily around the New Continent meant those countries attempting to move towards development by exporting their most prolific factor were at the mercy of this lottery. And in the event that the Latin American country is a coffee exporter, exporter of mining resources, or of wheat, maize or sugar, and has had recurrent
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de facto military governments, all this conspires to make it a given that its past, like its present is the result of an inevitable destiny. These types of interpretations of Latin American economic history are certainly not arbitrary. They were conceived of and disseminated by historians who relied on a not insignificant accumulation of empirical evidence. However, it is evident that there is still a substantial lack of quantitative data and that, in some way, this accumulated evidence falls far short of what is needed to provide a conclusive explanation for the causes of Latin American and Caribbean economic backwardness. In this regard, we are convinced that there is a delay in obtaining relevant information about this historical path. This delay is shaping the debate, and the dominant ideas are also spin-offs of the absence of this indispensable information. Evidence of this is the knowledge we have about the economic growth of Latin America and the Caribbean. In this sense, we know that research has moved forwards with regards to the big countries in the region, such as Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, and also about some medium-sized countries like Colombia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela, and one small country Uruguay. For all of these cases, we have GDP estimations from Maddisons compilation since at least 1900, although they are not always solid enough or sufficiently comparable. For the remaining countries, there is still a lack of knowledge of the effect on them positive, negative or neutral of their growing integration into the international economy until 1913. The information available for the period known as the transwar period (191445) is better, but suffers from several limitations: the GDP estimations are not easily comparable since they were made according to specific procedures for each country; we do not have information for the entire period; nor is there information for all countries; and existing information is often incomplete.

All of these limitations were progressively overcome in the post-war period after the Second World War when the System of National Accounts of the United Nations came to predominate. But without doubt, what we already know is far less relevant than what remains to be discovered. In short, in order to improve our understanding of the causes of economic backwardness of Latin American and the Caribbean, we must revise both the ideas with which we have dealt with the problem, as well as the empirical evidence on which they are based. The collection of contributions we have selected for the edition of this book are a step in this direction they offer new quantitative evidence compiled with extreme rigour and take on with audacity (but without rashness) the interpretation of the past. Another novelty about the texts presented for this edition is the wide territorial coverage and their tendency to

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study those cases for which information gathering is difficult (generally small or medium-sized countries), without losing the reference of the big economies in the region. We must underline the coherence there is among all the contributions in this volume, in terms of territorial coverage, historical periods and sectors of the economy. We provide a perspective from the cutting edge of knowledge about economic backwardness of Latin America and the Caribbean. We have before us a new vision of the economic history of the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. Below, we briefly review each of the contributions to the book. They are grouped according to whether they are regional or national studies. The following papers give a perspective of the whole of the subcontinent. Albert Carreras (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) looks for new interpretations for the Latin American economic evolution in the twentieth century, in the tensions caused by changes on the world economic stage. The comparison between the degree of openness of Europe and Lain America permits Carreras to reinterpret the reasons for accumulated economic backwardness during the years of highly protectionist policies. Mar Rubio (Universidad Pblica de Navarra) and Mauricio Folchi (Universidad de Chile) resort to sophisticated statistical techniques (the Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs test) and resume an optimistic perspective on foreign trade statistics as a source for the study of Latin American economic history. With this work, Rubio and Folchi lay the foundations for a new wave of research work with one of the best available sources of quantitative knowledge about the economy of Latin America and the Caribbean in the near future. Marc Badia-Mir (Universidad de Barcelona) and Anna Carreras-Marn (Universidad de Barcelona), making full use of foreign trade statistics, review the idea predominant until now that the United Kingdom had totally dominated Latin American trade relations before the First World War. With their new data, they bring to the fore the United States participation in this trade relation from early on. Xavier Tafunell (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) deals with investment in equipment goods in Latin America during the first globalization (18901930), offering a rigorous estimation of the investment in machinery for all (twenty) of the Latin American countries. This represents an important leap forward in the elaboration of a basic input for economic growth. The series on industrial and agricultural machinery, as well as electric and transport equipment, which Tafunell presents, estimated using trade statistics, promises to be a reference for economic historians dealing with the subject in the future. Vicente Neira (Universidad de Valparaso, Chile), calculates the functional income distribution for fourteen countries in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. Neiras groundbreaking series proposes a new vision of Latin America during its industrialization and deindustrialization, which changes our way of seeing the economic and social policies of the period. Frank Notten (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, The

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Hague) deals with the group of small Central American economies and explains the changes brought about by the First World War in their international economic relations. Notten is the first to take advantage of the full potential of the foreign trade statistics of the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany in order to understand the dynamics of the economies of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala at a critical time in their history. The chapters that follow take a perspective that focuses more on national cases. Csar Yez (Universidad de Barcelona), for example, studies the paths of Chile and Cuba throughout the nineteenth century, from the final stages of the colonial regime in Chile to Cuban Independence in 1898. Yez reviews the idea of the Hispanic colonial order and relates the oligarchic order of the nineteenth century with opportunities for economic growth in the two countries both successful exporters of their natural resources. As an indicator, Yez uses growth in apparent consumption of modern energies, following in this sense the proposal of Rubio, Yez, Folchi and Carreras of 2009. Andr Hofman (ECLAC) and Cristin Ducoing (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), in the wake of Tafunells work, carry out an in-depth study of machinery investment in Chile up to the early years of the twenty-first century, thereby offering a new assessment of what machinery investment meant for economic growth in the long run. The work of Hofman and Ducoing can be repeated for the other Latin American countries which have good foreign trade statistics, which is why this study is so important. Jos Jofr (Instituto Nacional de Estadsticas, Chile), does an in-depth study concerning energy consumption in Cuba in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its impact on the environment, particularly on tropical forests. Jofr, who studied the transition from the consumption of organic energies to fossil energies, is the first to provide us with complete energy accounting for Cuba at an early stage in its history. Santiago Colmenares (Universidad de Barcelona) retrieves a classical subject in Latin American economic history with his estimation using the double factorial technique of the terms of reference of Colombia between 1975 and 2006. Colmenares work achieves a decisive improvement in the reconstruction of historical series of terms of trade, which could also be imitated for other national cases. Jos Pres (Universidad de Barcelona) achieves extraordinary results in the elaboration of Bolivian fiscal series a country we know little about from a perspective of quantitative economic history. The fiscal structure of Bolivia in the first three decades of the twentieth century allows us to see the progress of the country while at the same time outlining the obstacles of its past, Carolina Romn (Universidad de la Repblica, Uruguay), examines the complex question of the demand function for durable consumer goods in six Latin American countries during the first globalization. Romns work stands out for its originality, in estimating consumption by means of the importation of goods in

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Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay, and the difficulty in determining the income and price elasticity of the demand for these types of goods. To end this preface, we would like to express our gratitude to the institutions and the people who have believed in the scientific capacity of this research team. In the first place, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, which between 2003 and 2006 backed the projects led by Albert Carreras, Importaciones y modernizacin econmica en Amrica Latina, 18901960 (BEC200300412) and between 2007 and 2010, Energa y economa en Amrica Latina y el Caribe, entre mediados del siglo XIX y mediados del siglo XX (SEJ2007-60445/ECON). Likewise, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation supported the project led by Xavier Tafunell (201113), Formacin y stock de capital y consumo de energa en Amrica Latina y el Caribe entre 1850 y 2010 (ECO201015882). In the final stage, these studies have received the backing of Conicyt of Chile, through the MEL project led by Csar Yez, Estado ciudadana y atraso econmico en Chile durante el siglo XX.La contribucin de la historia econmica a la comprensin del desarrollo chileno, at the Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile. We would also like to acknowledge Anya Doherty for the translation of texts by Jos Jofr, Csar Yez and Xavier Tafunell, and the Preface and Introduction by Csar Yez and Albert Carreras, as well for the overall style revision. Likewise, we acknowledge the collaboration of Alejandra Rojas in compiling the notes.

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