Setbacks And Advances In The Modern Latin American Economy

This volume explores several notable themes related to the economy in Latin America and offers insightful historical perspectives to understand national, regional, and global issues in the continent since the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. The collected essays focus on economic crises, the relationship of growth models to society and politics, the fluctuations of local economies, and regional protests. Other aspects of consideration in this area include the evolution of integrated regional trading blocs, the informal economy, and the destruction of the productive potential that has had a serious social, cultural, and environmental impact. The volume refuses to impose a traditional and uncritical linear historical narrative onto the reader and instead proposes an alternative interpretation of the past and its relation to the present.

This volume explores several notable themes related to the economy in Latin America and offers insightful historical perspectives to understand national, regional, and global issues in the continent since the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. The collected essays focus on economic crises, the relationship of growth models to society and politics, the fluctuations of local economies, and regional protests. Other aspects of consideration in this area include the evolution of integrated regional trading blocs, the informal economy, and the destruction of the productive potential that has had a serious social, cultural, and environmental impact. The volume refuses to impose a traditional and uncritical linear historical narrative onto the reader and instead proposes an alternative interpretation of the past and its relation to the present.

A comprehensive Statistical Appendix provides regional and country-by-country data in such areas as GDP, manufacturing, sector productivity, prices, trade, income distribution and living standards."--BOOK JACKET.

The late twentieth century witnessed the birth of an impressive number of new democracies in Latin America. This wave of democratization since 1978 has been by far the broadest and most durable in the history of Latin America, but many of the resulting democratic regimes also suffer from profound deficiencies. What caused democratic regimes to emerge and survive? What are their main achievements and shortcomings? This volume offers an ambitious and comprehensive overview of the unprecedented advances as well as the setbacks in the post-1978 wave of democratization. It seeks to explain the sea change from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which openly authoritarian regimes are the rare exception, and it analyzes why some countries have achieved striking gains in democratization while others have experienced erosions. The book presents general theoretical arguments about what causes and sustains democracy and analyses of nine compelling country cases.

The volume takes a broad view of recent social, political, and economic developments in Latin America. It contains six essays, focused on salient and cross-cutting themes, that try to construct a thread or narrative about the highly diverse region, highlighting its main idiosyncrasies and analyzing where it might be headed in coming years. While the essays recognize considerable advances, they also point out setbacks and missed opportunities that have stood in the way of sustained progress. Strengthening state capacity emerges as a significant challenge.

Now in its fourth edition, this leading reader has been updated to tighten the focus of each chapter on a major interpretive problem. This edition includes an entirely new chapter, “Historical Memory,” which allows readers to revisit the era of the Cold War from a contemporary perspective, and the chapters on nationalism and globalization have been thoroughly revised. The book continues to offer a rich variety of materials that can be tailored to the needs of individual instructors. The reader’s unique and successful chapter organization provides a thematic complement to narrative accounts of modern Latin American history. By focusing each chapter on a single concept or interpretive problem—such as nationalism, women’s rights, or social revolution—the text engages students in the analysis of historical sources and, at the same time, introduces them to the twists and turns of historiography. Each chapter in this new edition includes at least two primary sources. With its innovative combination of primary and secondary sources and editorial analysis, this text is designed specifically to stimulate critical thinking in a wide range of courses on Latin American history since independence.

This is a completely revised and updated edition of SR Books' classic text, Problems in Modern Latin American History. This book has been brought up to date by Professors John Charles Chasteen and James A. Wood to reflect current scholarship and to maximize the book's utility as a teaching tool. The book is divided into 13 chapters, with each chapter dedicated to addressing a particular 'problem' in modern Latin America-issues that complement most survey texts. Each chapter includes an interpretive essay that frames a clear central issue for students to tackle, along with excerpts from historical writing that advance alternative-or even conflicting-interpretations. In addition, each chapter contains primary documents for students to analyze in relation to the interpretive issues. This primary material includes passages of Latin American fiction in translation, biographical sketches, and images. Designed as a supplemental text for survey courses on Latin American history, this book's provocative 'problems' approach will engage students, evoke lively classroom discussion, and promote critical thinking.

This book critically assesses the human security challenges faced by states, focusing on how and to what extent the state is influenced by global structures and operations. Having grown rapidly since the 1990s, the field of human security has spawned a wide variety of academic research. This research has helped to reconceptualize the notion of security, both broadening and deepening it, and it has created a space where unconventional and multidimensional forms of security inform international policy practices. However, while various issues and cases of human security have received growing academic attention and policy interest, many of the existing books on human security focus primarily on non-state actors. This leaves a key question unanswered: why do sovereign states take on leadership roles in promoting human security? To answer the question of why and how national governments influence international human security policy, this volume examines the domestic political factors and structures that mediate the range of policy choices. Important domestic variables include the ‘cultural match’ (e.g., ‘Does the country often favor multilateralism and promote a rule-bound international society?’), the nature of the political interests and realities that are present (e.g., ‘Does the country see the promotion of human security as a strategic choice?’), and the occurrence of important historical events such as wars, revolutions, or natural disasters (e.g., ‘Does the country, during the crisis, help to foster a new way of managing enduring security threats?’). Using this line of analysis, the book illuminates the role of the state in handling critical human security issues and its rationale for doing so. This book will be of much interest to students of human security, peace studies, global governance, development studies and IR in general.