Title: Costa Rica and Uruguay
Description: Costa Rica and Uruguay are both formerly successful agricultural economies whose development has been startlingly similar in the twentieth century. Both achieved prosperity on the basis of the growth and export of primary products, and of democratic forms of government. But taxation and interventionist social policy redistributed earnings to their urban sectors and the consequent decline in the viability of their agricultural sectors eroded the fiscal base of both countries. As a result, both became vulnerable to external shocks. In Uruguay a balance of payments crisis was triggered by the large oil price increases of the early 1970s. Costa Rica, a decade later, suffered when voluntary lending to Latin America was brought to a halt by the world debt crisis.

This book explores the circumstances that led to the crises of the early 1970s in Uruguay and of the early 1980s in Costa Rica. The first part shows how the private management of the coffee economy in Costa Rica was absorbed into a parastatal system. The second examines how the livestock economy in Uruguay degenerated into stagnation between 1957 and 1973. A third part compares the experiences of the two countries.

This volume is the fifth emerging from the comparative study "The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity, and Growth," sponsored by the World Bank. Each volume provides both a historical narrative and a deeper explanation of how and why a selected pair of countries had their particular experiences of growth and income distribution between 1950 and 1985. Other volumes in the series compare Malawi and Madagascar, Egypt and Turkey, Brazil and Mexico, and Sri Lanka and Malaysia.
Subjects: Poor, Economic conditions, Income distribution, History, Costa rica, economic conditions, Income distribution, latin america, Poor, latin america, Uruguay, economic conditions
Places: Costa Rica, Uruguay
Time periods: 1945-, 1948-