There are almost 600 million people living south of Mexico's Rio Bravo, and a majority of them are either lower-middle-class or poor. This shouldn't be so. Latin America is rich in natural resources, geographic assets and human capital. Yet its economy runs dramatically behind that of English-speaking North America. Why?
Many historians and economists blame the region's underdevelopment on its colonial pastâ??on the vestiges of the Spanish crown's practice of exploiting resources for the home country, its effort to centralize the governance of a vast and diverse culture, and its campaign to export a supposedly anti-commercial Catholicism. Others point to the wars and political instability of the post-independence period, roughly from 1820 to 1870.
Yet these theories ignore the fact that in the 19th century many Latin American countries broke with their pasts and experimented with classical liberalism, which produced significant economic benefits. Unfortunately that effort was abandoned in the 20th century. And not surprisingly, as Sebastian Edwards, a former World Bank economist, showed in his 2010 book on Latin populism, "Left Behind," the income gap between Latin America and the world's advanced countries widened dramatically in the latter half of that century.
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