The economic history of Latin American economies as a laboratory for empirical research in the New Institutionalism is the subject of the Hoover Institution Press volume Political Institutions in Economic Growth in Latin America: Essays in Policy, History, and Political Economy.
Edited by Hoover Institution senior fellow Stephen Haber, the volume reports on the findings of a collaborative research symposium that took place at the Hoover Institution in February 1998. It offers a contribution to the literature on institutions and growth through the analysis of historical cases of institutional change and economic growth in Latin American in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also illustrates how political institutions—the rules and regulations that emerge out of political processes—fundamentally shaped the growth trajectories of the major economies of Latin America.
Haber and the contributors to this volume departed from conventional New Institutionalism theory with their belief that economic institutions cannot be studied in isolation from the institutions that regulate politics.
Contributing to the volume were William Summerhill on institutional determinants of railroad subsidies and regulation in imperial
Brazil; Stephen Haber on the political economy of financial market regulation and industrial productivity growth in Brazil, 1866–1934; Alan M. Taylor on Latin America and Foreign Capital in the Twentieth Century; Elisa Mariscal and Kenneth L. Sokoloff on schooling, suffrage, and the persistence of inequality in the Americas, 1800–1945; Alan Dye on privately and publicly induced institutional change relating to Cuban cane contracting, 1880–1936, and Douglass North and Barry R. Weingast who offer concluding remarks on the emerging new economic history of Latin America.
Stephen Haber is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He also holds a joint appointment as professor of history and political science at Stanford University. Haber also is a senior fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research, senior fellow at the Center for Research on Economic Development and Policy Reform, and Director of the Social Science History Institute at Stanford University.
His work focuses on the relationship between the regulation of banks and financial markets and industrial development, especially the cases of Mexico, Brazil, and the United States during the early stages of their economic growth.
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been at Stanford University since 1987.
