This paper offers a long-term comparative study of Bolivian public finances using a new detailed database. First, it shows that Bolivian government revenues and expenditures were particularly small and volatile until the 1980s. Second, it stresses that, whereas the relative importance of social expenditure has grown constantly since the late 1930s, public revenues have always had an unbalanced structure. Finally, it confirms that budget deficits have been constant, at times reaching levels that were especially damaging for the overall economy. This suggests that the potential redistributive impact of Bolivian public finances was not necessarily (or not only) hindered by the lack of an explicit commitment towards redistributive expenses, but by an extreme vulnerability in the revenue side.

Since the 1920 discovery of oil in Bolivia, the country has experimented with varying systems of private control, monopoly state ownership and even mixed state and private ownership/rental of petroleum and gas fields. The aim of our analysis is to explain why these varying patterns of ownership occurred over time and to describe how they affected production in this industry. The analysis suggests that nationalizations have been successful insofar as they took advantage of previous private investment which, meanwhile, underscores the success of the legislation for opening up access to attract private investment. This relative success of the different legal frameworks permits us to understand why the state has been changing from one scheme to another over time. Some partial explanations are offered in order to understand why these schemes could succeed with such regularity.

In the centuries before the Spanish conquest, the Bolivian space was among the most highly urbanized and complex societies in the Americas. In contrast, in the early twenty-first century, Bolivia is one of the poorest economies on the continent. According to Acemoglu et al. (Q J Econ 117(4):1231–1294, 2002), this disparity between precolonial opulence and current poverty would make Bolivia a perfect example of “reversal of fortune” (RF). This hypothesis, however, has been criticized for oversimplifying long-term development processes by “compressing” history (Austin in J Int Dev 20:996–1027, 2008). In the case of Bolivia, a comprehensive description and explanation of the RF process would require a global approach to the entire postcolonial era, which has been prevented so far by the lack of quantitative information for the period before 1950. This paper aims to fill that gap by providing new income per capita estimates for Bolivia in 1890–1950 and a point guesstimate for the mid-nineteenth century. Our figures indicate that divergence has not been a persistent feature of Bolivian economic history. Instead, it was concentrated in the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, and it was actually during the latter that the country joined the ranks of the poorest economies in Latin America. By contrast, during the first half of the twentieth century, the country converged with both the industrialized and the richest Latin American economies. The Bolivian postcolonial era cannot therefore be described as one of sustained divergence. Instead, the Bolivian RF was largely the combined result of post-independence stagnation and the catastrophic crises of the late twentieth century.

The new estimates of the Maddison Project show that GDP per capita ratio at purchasing power parity (ppp) between Bolivia and Finland has changed from 0.68 ca. 1850 to 0.16 in 2015; similarly, that between Chile and Norway from 0.65 to 0.28. The aim of this article is to present a review of the literature and available quantitative evidence to understand how these extreme differences became possible between countries with similarly enormous natural resource endowments. Specifically, the article seeks to: (a) identify some stylized facts that may help understand the divergence between Andean and Nordic countries; (b) identify key historical processes that explain the divergent effect of natural resource abundance in Andean and Nordic economies. In order to achieve these objectives, four topics are covered: GDPpc, population, trade and taxation. The analysis comprises three Nordic countries (Finland, Norway and Sweden) and three Andean countries (Bolivia, Chile and Peru) from the mid-Nineteenth Century to present day. The sample size, time span covered and thematic approach provide new evidence regarding previous work.

This paper assesses whether the disruption of world trade, protectionist policies and industrial growth that dominated South American economic history from 1912 to 1950 permitted an increase in intraregional trade. The paper demonstrates that during this period intraregional trade reached some of the highest levels of the entire 20th century. These levels have since receded. With the exception of some Brazilian exports, most of intraregional trade had the same features as global trade during this period: a high concentration on few products of very low value-added. These main findings suggest that, in contrast with other global experiences, intraregional trade did not directly support industrialization in South America during the first half of the 20th century. This resembles similar results from other Latin American studies, which remark that, beyond the rhetoric of regional integration and the signature of different trade agreements, few changes in the character of interregional trade emerged from the 1950s to the late 1980s (see Bulmer-Thomas (2003) and Devlin and Estevadeordal (2001)). In a time when intraregional trade is again at the forefront of the economic strategy of most South American countries (see Devlin and Ffrench-Davis (1999); Devlin and Estevadeordal (2001), and ECLAC (2011)), this finding certainly demands further study and explanation.