Scandinavia and South America: A Renewed Tradition of Comparative Studies

This chapter reviews the main analytical works and historical interpretations that examine the relative economic performance of Scandinavian and Latin American countries. It discusses the principal contributions and validity of the classical approaches, highlighting their key lessons as part of building a new comparative research agenda on the development patterns of both regions. The development patterns of these countries have been the subject of comparative analyses for several decades. One question that has clearly arisen from these studies is: why did natural resource-abundant regions with similar commercial links to the world economy during the first globalization era, have divergent development paths in the long run? The comparative approaches have sought to explain why the Scandinavian countries converged with the core countries in terms of productive structure, technology and income per capita, while Latin American countries did not overcome their peripheral condition in the world economy. Employing different theoretical approaches, the literature has focused on critical aspects of economic growth and development. This chapter presents these earlier contributions from comparative studies between Scandinavia and Latin America in order to provide some background to the ideas set out in the rest of this book.