Acknowledgments ; Preface ; 1. Introduction ; PART ONE: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT ; 2. Two Centuries of South American Reflections on the Development Gap between the United States and Latin America ; 3. Looking at Them: A Mexican Perspective on the Gap with the United Status ; 4. Explaining Latin America's Lagging Development in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: Growth Strategies, Inequality, and Economic Crises ; PART TWO: THE POLITICS OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA ; 5. Does Politics Explain the Economic Gap Between the United States and Latin America? ; 6. The Role of High Stakes Politics in Latin America's Development Gap ; PART THREE: INSTITUTIONAL FACTORS IN LATIN AMERICA'S DEVELOPMENT ; 7. Institutions and the Latin American Equilibrium ; 8. Do Defective Institutions Explain the Development Gap Between the United States and Latin America? ; 9. Why Institutions Matter: Fiscal Citizenship in Argentina and the United States ; PART FOUR: CONCLUSIONS ; 10. Conclusion ; About the contributors

"This volume constitutes one of the most thorough and lucid attempts to answer the fundamental question of why Latin America has become the West's least developed region. It's a must-read for both policymakers and scholars. Bravo and thanks to the authors."--Ernesto Zedillo, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and former President of Mexico "This indispensable book ends the debate over why we Latinos are not rich Americans: It's not our culture, religion, intellects, or even the U.S. that keep us behind. It's our defective institutions. So let reform begin. Thanks to Fukuyama and his distinguished colleagues, governments have no more excuses to avoid legal change."--Hernando de Soto, author of The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else "It is a measure of this book's seriousness that there are no easy recipes in it. Falling Behind makes a valuable contribution to the debate about Latin America."--The Times Literary Supplement "Provides valuable insights into how both formal and informal institutions have shaped economic and political outcomes in Latin America...this book should be a valuable and timely addition to upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses dealing with the economic challenges facing Latin American and Caribbean countries."--Eastern Economic Journal "A set of historical essays help us to understand that the development gap with the United States emerged in the first two thirds of the nineteenth century as Latin American societies struggled to form coherent nation-states following independence from Spain and Portugal. ... Francis Fukuyama examines the importance of institutions." --Political Science Quarterly

Selling point: Francis Fukuyama is one of the major figures of contemporary modern political thought, and has written successfully on a wide range of topics Selling point: The divide between Latin America and the United States is at the root of perhaps the hottest controversy in American politics today-immigration Selling point: Contains essays by the most widely respected and leading scholars in the field

Selling point: Francis Fukuyama is one of the major figures of contemporary modern political thought, and has written successfully on a wide range of topics Selling point: The divide between Latin America and the United States is at the root of perhaps the hottest controversy in American politics today-immigration Selling point: Contains essays by the most widely respected and leading scholars in the field