I. Introduction
1
This paper draws on a comparative institutional or ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach to
identify core features of capitalism in Latin America.
2
The comparative institutional analysis of
different kinds of capitalism has been elaborated recently most extensively for OECD countries.
Although this approach has a long tradition in Latin America, it has been semi-dormant in recent
years. Beyond reviving this tradition, a comparative institutional perspective brings several
innovations to the study of contemporary Latin American political economy. Most importantly it
incorporates labor relations and worker training into analyses of overall capitalist coordination; it
shifts attention from states to firms; and it directs the empirical focus away from recent policy
changes toward enduring, underlying institutional features of capitalism in the region.
The study of distinctive forms of capitalism in Latin America went through several stages
over past decades, before slipping down the list of research priorities. Early analyses began with
the assumption that entrepreneurs drove capitalist development, studied the behavior and attitudes
of Latin American capitalists, and usually concluded that business people were insufficiently
entrepreneurial (see for example Lauterbach 1965). In the 1960s and 1970s this perspective that
focused on individuals in a domestic setting was supplanted by an approach that started with
structures in the international economy, namely dependency theory. Here the problem with Latin
American capitalism was that it was dependent, externally constrained, and lacked internal
dynamism (Cardoso 1979; Evans 1979). By the 1970s and 1980s, the analysis of Latin American
------------------------------------
1
I am indebted to David Soskice for early conversations on education and training in Latin
America. I am grateful to the Searle Foundation for financial support and to Barbara Murphy for
research assistance.
2
The current broad currency of the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach owes much to the
popularity of the eponymous volume edited by Peter Hall and David Soskice (2001). However,
the comparative institutional analysis of capitalism has a long intellectual pedigree that includes,
on developed countries, at least Gerschenkron (1962), Shonfield (1965), Katzenstein (1978),
Zysman (1983), and Piore and Sabel (1984), and on developing countries Leff (1978), Cardoso
and Faletto (1979), Evans (1979; 1995) (1979; 1995), Amsden (1989), Huber (2002), and Guillén
(2001).
Convention