The three and a half LAs world

• Grant number: 17/10121-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2017
• End date: November 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics - Growth, Fluctuations and Economic Planning
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Alberto Cinquetti
• Grantee: Eduardo Augusto Chades
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 18/06665-8 - Capability, capacity and mobility in Latin America, BE.EP.IC

Abstract

Why are they (North America) so rich and we so poor? We propose to answer the question with a historical and descriptive panel from Latin America (LA), which would be grouped into three (and a half) types of countries. This empirical analysis would be structured by a theoretical perspective that takes separately, two fundamental dimensions for continuous economic development (or growth): social conditions of efficient production in scale, given by social capacity, and conditions of productive and permanent institutional innovation, given by social mobility. The first is defined by "education, transportation, and property rights", which means expanding social capacity (for absorption of technology), incorporating one element of economic geography and another of contracts. Social mobility is defined by "competition, accessibility, and trust", which means evaluating the environment for innovations from the impersonal choice of the best products and producers, ease of information and standards for joining and staying in an economic or political activity, and finally, degree of trust in people and institutions to ensure stable progress of economic relations in a private information environment. LA is deficient in social capacity, and the lack of social mobility, rather than a result, is a condition, insofar as lack of competition, accessibility and trust define institutional elements of a non-innovative society. And the roots of this non-innovative institutional superstructure lie in its colonial past, more particularly in its traumas on inter-ethnic relations and international trade. This identification of the historical roots of low economic development in LA will serve to map or structure the proposed empirical analysis, whose work of gathering evidence is well advanced, if not concluded. The most challenging thing, in such analysis, is to apply more advanced data visualization, for which we would use the Mathematica software. (AU)