According to Barrington Moore ‘the process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail’.1 Most historians of Mexico would agree that the nineteenth century opened with such an agrarian insurrection – the Insurgency – and yet it is indisputable that modernisation was a long time coming. Indeed, for many years the conventional view was that it took another such agrarian rising, the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, to finally break the ‘feudal’ hold on the countryside and usher in a belated phase of modernisation.

During the first thirty years of this century the Bolivian economy provided a classic example of export-led growth. Mining, with tin at the forefront, responded to the stimulus of both world demand and price, and was the leading sector of the economy. Tin exports increased five-fold from 1900 to 1929, and Bolivia's share of world production more than doubled, accounting for approximately a quarter of total world production from 1918 to 1929.

During the Second World War, Bolivia became the single most important source of tin for the Allies. As with other Latin American countries who were placed in the position of supplying essential raw materials,1 Bolivia confronted a situation where the operation of normal market forces was suspended. Access to Axis markets was denied, and prices were set through government intervention, often at widely divergent levels in different markets. As a result, the impression was created that the poor producers were prevented from enjoying a wartime bonanza by exploitative collusion on the part of the rich consumers.

Cooperation among developing countries in the form of economic integration has received increased attention as a development strategy. About one-half of all developing countries currently participate in integration schemes.1 Yet there have been few attempts to measure the effects on trade flows associated with these integration efforts.2 The scarcity of such studies stems from a dissatisfaction on the part of some investigators regarding the applicability to developing countries of evaluative criteria formulated by Viner to assess world-wide allocative gains from industrial nation integration schemes.3 A lack of interest in the traditional method of evaluating integration efforts is also motivated by the expectation that static gains will be small or nonexistent in developing country integration schemes, where even collectively markets are often small and members display little differences in relative factor endowments.

Although the Dominican Republic had one of the highest economic growth rates in the world between 1969 and 1973, its growth performance and external position deteriorated sharply in the 1970s. By 1985 it had an external debt/GDP ratio of 76.6%, well above the average of 62.3% for the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole.1 The Dominican debt crisis that emerged in the 1980s, like the crisis in many other debtridden Less Developed Countries (LDCs), was in part caused by adverse external conditions; in part, however, it was the result of domestic policy choices. Among the latter, large fiscal imbalances are arguably the most important.2