This book is a compilation of papers that address the quintessential question in Latin American economic history: why did Latin America fall behind the United States and Western Europe? Thus, the essays in this volume examine factors that delayed Latin America's adoption of modern technologies and energy sources in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The overall argument of the book is that Latin America was very slow to adopt the latest technologies from the more industrialized countries, kept an inefficient energy matrix for too long, and in the second half of the twentieth century missed important opportunities to grow by not adapting to the changes in global trade after the Great Depression.

The editors of the current volume set the bar high by portraying the book as the new reference that will supersede previous classic volumes that study long-run development in the region. To be fair, the book deserves credit for its methodological complexity and for the new data and insights it provides. One of its greatest contributions is that besides dealing with the largest economies in the region, it includes detailed studies of the development of Central America, Chile, and Colombia.

The book is divided into twelve chapters and a short preface. In the preface, the editors criticize the literature that attributes the underdevelopment of Latin America to the institutions adopted during colonial times and emphasize the importance of external shocks and the slow process of adaptation to such shocks as the main cause of the region's underdevelopment. The introductory chapter contains a discussion of the divergence between the region and the developed world, mostly using data from Angus Maddison. In chapter 2, Albert Carreras explains that, in comparison to Europe, the slow response of governments in Latin America to the changes in global openness to trade after the Great Depression eventually led to populism and to an erosion of institutions. In chapter 3, María del Mar Rubio and Mauricio Folchi discuss the inaccuracies of trade statistics in the region using an original non-parametric test with data for 1925. In chapter 4, Marc Badia-Miró and Anna Carreras-Marín show how countries in the region had started to favor the United States over the United Kingdom as the main trading partner before World War I.

Chapter 5 is one of the jewels of the volume because in it Xavier Tafunell examines the imports of machinery (by type) to all the countries in the region between 1890 and 1930 and provides the data for researchers interested in the topic. In chapter 6, Vicente Neira Barría presents new series of the labor share of income in Latin American countries from 1950 to 2000 and studies their instability. César Yañez, in chapter 7, looks at the puzzling cases of Chile and Cuba, two countries that adopted modern technologies and energy sources earlier than the rest of the region in the nineteenth century. André Hofman and Cristián Ducoing do a more in-depth analysis of the industrialization and development of Chile in chapter 8.

Another original contribution of the book is that it emphasizes the study of energy sources as a way to understand patterns of development. For instance, chapters 5 and 7 look at machinery imports and the energy sources used to fuel Latin American economies. Chapter 9 goes even deeper and studies the energy transition in the modernization of Cuba from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

In chapter 10, Santiago Colmenares uses new data for Colombia (1976–2002) to falsify the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis, i.e., the idea that by exporting primary products, the periphery suffered from a secular deterioration in the terms of trade vis-à-vis the developed world. In chapter 11, José Alejandro Peres Cajías analyzes an original series of fiscal accounts for Bolivia for the first half of the twentieth century, shows that revenues were highly dependent on trade taxes and were, therefore, highly unstable. Finally, in chapter 12, Carolina Román Ramos studies the demand for durable goods in six economies using an original panel of data on imports. She estimates income and price elasticities that reveal interesting differences in the behavior of the demand for these “luxury goods” across countries.

The original sin of conference volumes is that it is hard for their editors to create a common argument and methodological approach to link all the chapters. The Economies of Latin America is excellent at conveying a clear idea of the development paths and industrialization patterns in the region. Yet, it is less clear when it comes to explaining why countries did not adopt better technologies or energy sources. Moreover, the volume is too heterogeneous to overcome the original sin of conference volumes. Still, this volume provides new hypotheses and data that will have economic historians debating why Latin America has lagged behind the developed world since independence.