Capability, capacity and mobility in Latin America

• Grant number: 18/06665-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2018
• End date: July 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics - Growth, Fluctuations and Economic Planning
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Alberto Cinquetti
• Grantee: Eduardo Augusto Chades
• Supervisor: Maria Cristina Trindade Terra
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales (ESSEC), France
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/10121-0 - The three and a half LAs world, BP.IC

Abstract

We condense three fundamental concepts in recent economic development literature: social capability, economic mobility and state capacity. These are the dimensions that we are going to use to build an descriptive frame of Latin American (LA) historical growth and discriminate between different regions within the continent. We revisit the work of Rauch & Kotyshak (2009) and suggest The Three and a Half LAs Worlds, exploring the colonization shock started by the European empires, and the reverberations of this trauma on trust and commercial relations. This distortive start had implications on the design and historical path of institutions, helping us answer the question "why Latin America got behind?". The first dimension, social capacity, has three pillars: human capacity, trust and safety, and interaction capacity. Economic mobility as free entry in economics and politics, general rules, and simple and transparent rules and state capacity as fiscal capacity, enforcement of law and order, provision of public goods and legitimacy of government. This trinity of variable groups will be used to distinguish LA in three worlds: strong indigenous influence, strong European influence and miscegenous ethnic composition. Brazil would be a part of the European influence group, but its North-South extension, monarchical history and established Portuguese colonization make us think of a half new group. For this to be accomplished we are going to use statistical tools like regression analysis, a descriptive frame with motion in time and data visualization techniques with the help of Mathematica. (AU)