A more accurate title for this book might be Latin American Economic and Commercial Lore. It provides the reader with a miscellaneous assortment of economic facts, ideas, and opinions helpful only to a limited degree in understanding the field. A basic defect is the absence of an adequate or consistent analytical base, and this curtails the book’s usefulness and significance. An illuminating example of the book’s lack of integration appears in the topic headings of chapter 11 dealing with institutional barriers—landowners, dictators, army, Catholicism, bureaucracy, lack of entrepreneurship, decentralization and delegation of responsibility, and the Spanish language. In the important area of Latin American economics, which calls for a thoroughgoing and analytically oriented treatment, this book must be regarded as little more than a tentative step. It is far from being the definitive work which its title suggests.
The author’s stated analytical framework is that of the Veblen-Ayres model. Yet his book fails to adhere to the author’s own expression of this model (Chapter 11). He presents a pastiche of professed institutionalism bearing Veblen’s label and such fragments of orthodox economics as suit his purpose or convenience. In the main he seems to be saying that orthodox economics is a subordinate and unimportant discipline, despite its demonstrated achievements in predicting and controlling economic phenomena such as unemployment and the trade cycle. He also appears to be denying the important advisory role of economists in achieving unprecedentedly high levels of economic development. Moreover, he neglects the abundant orthodox literature on invention, innovation, and technological change.
The book’s particular weakness for students and laymen is that it gives an erroneous conception of the nature of the economic problem and the possible contribution, modest though it may be, that economists can make to the solution of Latin American problems. The author’s approach permits him to indulge in assertions and obiter dicta ignoring relevant evidence or even contradicting data. He recognizes the result of his methods in the topic sentence of his conclusion: “This book is much more an expression of opinion that it is a rigorous report of research findings.” Readers should take this sentence quite literally.
