Abstract:
This volume explores institutional change and performance in the resource-rich
Andean countries during the last resource boom and in the early post-boom years.
The latest global commodity boom has profoundly marked the face of the
resource-rich Andean region, significantly contributing to economic growth and
notable reductions of poverty and income inequality. The boom also constituted a
period of important institutional change, with these new institutions sharing the
potential of preventing or mitigating the maladies extractive economies tend to
suffer from, generally denominated as the “resource curse”. This volume explores
these institutional changes in the Andean region to identify the factors that have
shaped their emergence and to assess their performance. The interdisciplinary
and comparative perspective of the chapters in this book provide fine-grained
analyses of different new institutions introduced in the Andean countries and
discusses their findings in the light of the resource curse approach. They argue
that institutional change and performance depend upon a much larger set of
factors than those generally identified by the resource curse literature. Different,
domestic and external, economic, political and cultural factors such as ideological
positions of decision-makers, international pressure or informal practices have
shaped institutional dynamics in the region. Altogether, these findings emphasize
the importance of nuanced and contextualized analysis to better understand
institutional dynamics in the context of extractive economies.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the extractive
industries, natural resource management, political economics, Latin American
studies and sustainable development.
