Comment on : ‘ ‘ Latin America in the rear view mirror ’ ’ $

This is an insightful paper on Latin America as a development disappointment. I agree with the authors that Latin America’s performance over the last two decades, or the last five decades, or even the last century is a disappointment. However, the authors’ perspectives on this disappointment are a little open to question. First is the claim that Latin America is a unique disappointment. They make this case on three grounds: (1) that Latin America performed poorly compared to what they label its peer group of Western European countries, (2) Latin America performed much worse than East Asian nations, which should have been at a disadvantage adopting Western technology, (3) other developing regions such as Africa and the Middle East suffered from other factors that explain their poor performance, and these other factors are much worse than anything Latin America faced. All three of these arguments fall a little short of persuasion. (1) depends on Western Europe being the correct peer group for Latin America. They apparently choose it based on the claim that Latin America is a region with a majority of European population. To derive Table 1, they make the curious decision to add together ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘mixed white’’. ‘‘Mixed white’’ (mestizo and mulatto) populations in Latin America started with worse initial conditions and have