This article surveys the most recent developments in the field of Mexican economic history.It argues that the last ten years has seen a significant shift in the methodology and focus of the field, away from dependency and traditional institutional analysis, and towards the extensive use of cliometric techniques and hypotheses drawn from the New Institutional Economics. This shift has greatly increased our understanding of several key issues in Mexico's economic history, but much of the work done to date has lacked a coherent focus on a specific set of issues. In other words, the field has recently made astounding progress, but still lacks sufficient order.

This articles surveys the developments in the field of Colombian economic history in the last fifty years, through a discussion of five fundamental books. It is shown how these studies has been dominated by marxism, traditional institutional history, Annales, and dependency. However, in the 1990's there has been a shift away from the field on the part of historians and an increasing amount of research on the part of economists working within the neo-classical tradition.

This article offers an overview of the evolution of economic historiography of the First Republic in order to consider why it has taken so long for domestic financial history to gain importance on the research agendas of Brazilian economic historians. It contends that the focus of dependency theory on international markets resulted in neglecting the structure of domestic finance. Recently, scholars have turned their attention to approaches that emphasize a balance between domestic and international economic factors, including looking at the distribution networks and institutional frameworks of domestic finance. Evidence from this perspective suggests that within private sectors, financial stability emerged during the First Republic and finance made positive contributions to growth, despite the vicissitudes of public finance. This tentative finding offers a very different perspective on the nature of Brazilian economic development and raises challenging new questions.

This paper is concerned with recent development of Economic History in Uruguay. It focuses on its institutional features as well as on the prevailing theoretical and methodological approaches and research topics. A foundational period 1960–1985 is shortly reviewed. Recent development is thereafter discussed and characterised as one of dispersion, re-foundation and specialisation. The paper concludes that, notwithstanding Economic History loosed its central place and weight among the social sciences, the discipline has gone through a process of institutional and organisational strengthening. This embraces specialised graduate education, fluent relationships to the international community and an attempt to combine historical knowledge with rigorous treatment of theory and method. On this basis, the production of more and better facts has been increasing and, hopefully, the discipline may regain an outstanding place in academic life.

By 1914, there were huge economic gaps between the Southern Cone plus Cuba and the rest of Latin America. Can they be explained by the varying ability of these countries to exploit the first great globalization boom after about 1870? Or did the gaps appear much earlier? And what about the gaps between Latin America and the Mediterranean, let alone with industrial leaders like Britain? What role did geographic isolation, globalization and demographic forces play in the process? Conventional GDP estimates are much too coarse to confront these questions. This essay uses a new data base on real wages and relative factor prices for seven Latin American and three Mediterranean regions, the latter being a source of so many of immigrants for the former. These ten regions, plus comparative information from Britain and the United States, form the data base for the paper.

This paper studies the significant role played by Spanish entrepreneurs in the formation of the capitalist society in Northen Mexico. The available information shows the present of prominent businessmen of Spanish origin from 1840 onwards. Although limited in cuantitative terms the Spanish emigration had an important impact on Mexico during the second part of the XIXth century.

Modern textile manufacture appeared early in Mexico and grew continuously through the 19th century. Yet, it did not translate into a successful industrialization process as a result of naturally endowed high transportation costs and institutional frailty: a concept that encompasses institutional uncertainty, weakness and fragmentation. Institutional frailty generated a captured tariff policy that gave low effective protection to the industry, a backward financial market that limited resources available for industrial growth, and increased transportation costs through inter-state tariff barriers. High transportation costs fragmented the national market and as a result, the textile industry grew geographically dispersed.

The paper describes the development of Argentine agriculture during the turn of last century. It analyzes existing historiography on the topic and presents some new estimates of the evolution of the factors of production and factor intensity.