Latin America: Brazil and Bolivia

This module examines key issues of the political economy of Latin America, adopting a comparative lens to the study of Brazil and Bolivia. Latin America was subject to colonial rule for over three centuries and,  roughly two hundred year after the liberation from Spain and Portugal, the legacies of colonialism are still vivid. Over the past century, the region has experienced a variety of political regimes, from military dictatorships to liberal democracies and diverse experiences of populist rule. Furthermore, the continent has experimented with a wide-ranging set of development strategies, such as import-substitution industrialisation under a developmental state, the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’, and commodity-based, export-orientated  models. Throughout these different political regimes and development strategies, and in spite of a recent decrease of income inequality, Latin America has continuously been regarded as the most unequal continent in the world, with complex distributive patterns spread across race, class and gender dimensions.

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