------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: Economists in the Americas

Published by EH.Net (January 2012)

Verónica Montecinos and John Markoff, editors, Economists in the
Americas. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009. xx + 341 pp. $155
(hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84542-043-7.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Mauro Boianovsky, Department of Economics,
Universidade de Brasília.

Largely thanks to Bob Coats’s (1924-2007) pioneering studies about the
sociology and professionalization of economics, research about the
emergence of economics as a discipline and the development of the
contexts and institutions in which economists act have become an
important area in the history of economic thought. One should expect
that the subject would attract also the attention of social scientists
such as sociologists and political scientists. Economists in the
Americas, edited by sociologists Verónica Montecinos and John Markoff
(from Pennsylvania State University and University of Pittsburgh,
respectively), offers a detailed investigation of the history of the
economics profession in the Americas in the form of case studies of a
representative set of Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay) plus one chapter about the United
States.  Coats focused on North American and British economic thought;
a couple of Latin American case studies (particularly about Brazil, by
Paulo R. Haddad and Maria R. Loureiro, whose essay is partly
reproduced in the volume under review) can be found in the 1981 and
1997 collections edited by him for the History of Political Economy
(HOPE) about economists in the government and the internationalization
of economics after 1945. Economists in the Americas, as acknowledged
by the editors, adds to Coats’s path-breaking research and follows his
lead and inspiration.

Although the essays assembled in the book offer much valuable
information about the historical evolution and consolidation of
economic epistemic communities in the Americas throughout the
twentieth century, their main goal is rather to understand the factors
behind the paradigm shift that took place in Latin American economic
theory and policy between the 1970s and 1990s. It was a doctrinal
change expressed as a clear move from “developmentalism” or
“structuralism” towards what was named (mostly by its critics)
“neo-liberalism.” Instead of state-led import-substituting
industrialization, economists shifted to a “more market, less state”
view, and promoted free-market reforms in order to implement it. As
the editors explain, the book had a long gestation period; early
versions of the chapters were presented at the 2001 meetings of the
Latin American Studies Association held in the U.S. This probably
explains why editors and contributors do not take into account another
volume that addresses the same issue about doctrinal change
(FitzGerald and Thorp 2005).  There is a significant overlap between
those two books, although the volume edited by FitzGerald and Thorp,
based on a conference held in Oxford in 2000, is not dominated by case
studies (there are just two, on Colombia and Mexico), featuring
contributions by economists, historians and a political scientist.
Only one of the contributors to Economists in the Americas is an
economist, two are political scientists and the other six are
sociologists. Moreover, regarding nationality, four are Latin
Americans – one of them (Montecinos) affiliated to a North American
university – and the others are North Americans. The first discussion
of the paradigm shift in Latin American economics came out, however,
in an article by Albert Fishlow (then in UC– Berkeley’s Economics
Department) as far back as 1985. And it is still attracting the
attention of the literature on Latin American economics (see Ocampo
and Ros 2011).

As documented by the case studies, the origins of economics as a
separate profession in Latin America – despite the fact that there was
already some economic literature and teaching at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, when a broad
liberal outlook prevailed – can be traced to the 1930s and 1940s. The
early generations of economists in the region were generally
associated with nationalism and protectionism, a tendency that would
be much reinforced after CEPAL (the United Nations Economic Commission
for Latin America) was established in Santiago in the late 1940s. This
started to change in the mid 1970s, especially in Chile, where a
cooperation agreement had been signed in 1955 between the University
of Chicago and the Catholic University of Santiago. The so-called
“Chicago Boys” (Chilean economists with Chicago Ph.D. training) came
to dominate economic thought and policy in Chile. Initially associated
with Pinochet’s authoritarian regime, Chile’s market reforms and their
effects on the economy became even more visible after the return of
democracy in the 1990s. From that perspective, the economic
neo-liberal movement started in Chile even before Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher made it a key element of their respective government
agendas in the U.S. and the UK. However, as far as Latin America as a
whole is concerned, the collection makes clear that the main fact
determining the paradigm shift was the Mexican default of 1982 and the
ensuing debt crisis that affected most countries in the region for the
rest of the decade. That was the turning point for economic policy and
thought in Latin America, when the indigenous approach represented by
structuralism was largely abandoned and replaced by the international
prevailing economic doctrines. One of the main contributions of the
comparative essays collected in this volume is to show the increasing
role of Latin American economists as members of national political
elites on one side and of the international economic community
dominated by North American economics on the other, which has provided
much of the source of their domestic power.

Paradoxically, as argued by Marion Fourcade in her chapter about the
United States, although economics has played an essential role in
North American economy and society, the political influence of
economists in that country has been much lower than for their Latin
American colleagues in their own nations. This is due, in her view, to
the fact that U.S. economics has acquired its status through its
association with science and its attempted separation from politics.
That chapter offers a brief discussion of changes in North American
economics after the end of the Keynesian consensus in the early 1970s,
but the reader must look elsewhere in order to understand the complex
rise of free market economics and the dramatic change in the
economists’ perception of the role of the state between the 1970s and
1990s (see Backhouse 2005), which have had a strong influence in Latin
America and other regions. True enough, neo-liberalism has not gone
unchallenged in countries such as Brazil, where there has been a
polarization between orthodox Americanized economic institutions and
heterodox ones, as documented in the chapter about Brazil. However, as
made clear throughout the book, this has not threatened the broad
consensus view on “sound economic fundamentals” such as trade
openness, fiscal discipline, and transparent and steady monetary
policy shared by most economists in the region and originally laid out
by John Williamson in the early 1990s as part of what he famously
called the “Washington Consensus.”

Finally, according to the lengthy editorial introduction, Latin
American economists have contributed relatively little to economics
worldwide, as judged by names listed in the Who’s Who in Economics.
The editors (see p. 7 of the book) tried to extend the exercise to the
field of history of economic thought, by assessing articles published
by Latin American scholars (or about Latin American economics) in HOPE
and the Journal of the History of Economic Theory (JHET) between 1985
and 2005, with the conclusion that hardly any articles belonging to
those categories appeared in those journals. They reached that result
by studying a sample of years for HOPE (1985, 1990, 1995, 2000 and
2005) and JHET (1990, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2005). This is a very
doubtful methodology, which makes it hard to interpret their results.
Whereas it is probably true that articles by Latin American authors or
about Latin American history of thought are relatively few, the set is
certainly higher than measured by that kind of exercise. But this is
just a quibble in this fine collection about the recent dynamics of
the economics profession in the Americas, which is hoped to increase
the conversation between social scientists and historians of economic
thought.

References:

Backhouse, R. (2005), “The Rise of Free Market Economics: Economists
and the Role of the State since 1970,” in The Role of Government in
the History of Economic Thought, ed. by S. Medema and P. Boettke.
Supplement to Vol. 37 of History of Political Economy.

Coats, A.W., editor (1981), Economists in the Government: An
International Comparative Study, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Coats, A.W., editor (1997), The Post-1945 Internationalization of
Economics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Supplement to vol. 28 of
History of Political Economy.

Fishlow, A. (1985), “The State of Economics in Latin America,”
Economic and Social Progress in Latin America, pp. 131-59.
Inter-American Development Bank.

FitzGerald, V. and R. Thorp, editors (2005), Economic Doctrines in
Latin America: Origins, Embedding and Evolution, London: Palgrave
Macmillan.

Ocampo, A.J. and J. Ros (2011), “Shifting Paradigms in Latin America’s
Economic Development,” in Handbook of Latin American Economics, ed. by
Ocampo and Ros. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mauro Boianovsky is Professor of Economics at Universidade de
Brasília. His research focuses upon the history of macroeconomics,
monetary theory and development economics. He is the co-author, along
with Roger Backhouse, of Transforming Modern Macroeconomics: The
Search for Disequilibrium Microfoundations, 1956-2003, Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming (2012).

Copyright (c) 2012 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the
EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]). Published by EH.Net
(January 2012). All EH.Net reviews are archived at
http://www.eh.net/BookReview.

Geographic Location: Latin America, incl. Mexico and the Caribbean
Subject: History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Time: 20th Century: Pre WWII, 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII