This comparative analysis sets out to explain how some countries become developed economies, while others fail. The answer of why Peru falls behind, however, does not become sufficiently clear. Erratic economic policymaking, technology and education gaps, raw materials dependency, and weak institutions are listed, but the discussion does not go so deep as to rank and historicize causes. Overall, it does not say something that previous scholarship has not already told us. In particular, resource endowments and the quality of institutions are identified as integral parts of the explanation, but there is no systematic attempt to evaluate the significance of those, or the other usual suspects for growth without development. Why and how geography or institutions matter for the chosen cases and in the selected period is not explained in depth.
With regard to the most relevant comparison, with Chile, the author reviews facts from the 1970s on and uses secondary sources. Such choices leave aside the most important interwar and long nineteenth-century periods, which are key to making sense of more contemporary developments. In fact, a more comprehensive historical view is needed to fully grasp developmental state experiences and, more broadly, the state developmentalism that was behind the successes and failures in both East Asia and Latin America. The role of the national development corporation, CORFO, established in the 1930s is mentioned, but not properly developed. The CORFO era of high state interventionism shaped the neoliberal one, which offers a contrasting experience to discuss the late-ISI/radical-laissez-fare Peruvian sequence. Thus, the account of the Chilean experience and the lessons drawn from it remain rather superficial.
The same goes for the review of the Korean case. The early characterization of Korea's development experience as a public-private partnership (6), neither neoliberal, nor state-centered, could lead to confusion. As the book itself makes clear, the historical record is made of diverse forms of state interventionism across the developing world, before the global rise of neoliberalism (José Antonio Ocampo and Jaime Ros, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Economics, 2011; Stephan M. Haggard, Developmental States, 2018). Thus, the question is more about what accounts for the success or failure of (diverse forms of) “statism” in the twentieth century. Chapter 4 on Korea is rather more careful with its choice of words, drawing on the “state-led” thesis defended by scholars of the East Asian miracles.
Unfortunately, the black box of state activism is not fully opened for readers, so that there is no clear lesson for Peruvian economists on why policymaking and institutions worked well in Korea and around Korea. What made “coherent” an economic policy strategy to foster manufactured exports? The author repeats the conventional wisdom of the past, which says that Latin America employed Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), while East Asia embraced export promotion. The global historical record, again, shows a diversity of stages, sequences, and results.
Chapter 5 reviews education and technology gaps in Peru. Although goals were reached in primary enrollment, cross-country evidence shows that the quality of education was poor. As is well known, Latin American nations do not expend in education or technological innovation as much as other middle-income or resource-rich national economies—and Peru does not appear high within the Latin American set. On top of that, structural inequality in Latin America means that access to tertiary and overall high-quality education is highly restricted to non-indigenous, non-Afro-descendant, white, and creole groups. A discussion of intergroup and gender inequalities in education would have been much welcomed.
What should a Peru growth strategy for the twenty-first century look like? Policy coordination to prioritize manufacturing is a central part of the solution, according to the closing chapter. Unequal and resource-rich Peru is called upon to produce good governance, coherent public policies, political stability, and institutional development, for which there is no apparent recipe.
