The Political Economy of the Post Commodity Boom Crises in Latin America

Abstract

This chapter revives some of the original insights from the dependency research program in order to understand the situation of the Latin American continent after the commodity boom decade. First, it is argued that we cannot only depend on macroeconomic explanations of what went wrong with the different countries’ economic policies after the commodity boom, nor on an evaluation of the strength or weakness of domestic economic institutions, but we have to consider, in the best tradition of the dependency research program, the character of the State and the composition of the social coalition. Second, following the idea of the existence of diverse situations of dependency, it argues that the combination between a certain form of the State and specific social alliances, can generate diverse types of capitalism in the periphery. To show this, we analyze in detail the situation of the more redistributive types of capitalism (of the rentier and developmentalist type) and how they coped with the end of the commodity boom. The analysis shows that the form of the state and social alliances can not only generate variations within types of capitalism, but also diverse trajectories within them, as the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia attest.