Science in Latin America has roots that reach back to the information gathering and recording practices of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations. Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and colonists introduced European scientific practices to the continent, where they hybridized with local traditions to form the beginnings of a truly Latin American science. As countries achieved their independence in the nineteenth century, they turned to science as a vehicle for modernizing education and forwarding "progress." In the twentieth century, science and technology became as omnipresent in Latin America as in the United States and Europe. Yet despite a history that stretches across five centuries, science in Latin America has traditionally been viewed as derivative of and peripheral to Euro-American science. To correct that mistaken view, this book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of science in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present. Eleven leading Latin American historians assess the part that science played in Latin American society during the colonial, independence, national, and modern eras, investigating science's role in such areas as natural history, medicine and public health, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, politics and nation-building, educational reform, and contemporary academic research. The comparative approach of the essays creates a continent-spanning picture of Latin American science that clearly establishes its autonomous history and its right to be studied within a Latin American context.

First published in 1993. Latin America is undergoing a process of profound economic and social change. The industrial import substitution that continued for several decades was quantitatively successful in terms of industrialization but - like inward-oriented industrialization in the socialist countries - failed to raise the economies of the region to international productivity levels. The attempt at catch-up industrialization outside the reference frame of the world market led to economic stagnation, social crises, serious environmental degradation and the obstruction of social development. The following papers included in this book, show that the development of competitive advantages is initially determined by the new macro policy and by modernization at enterprise level.

This collection of papers considers many of the important issues raised by these dramatic changes in emerging financial markets, including: the nature of this systemic risk and how governments can go about reducing it: how to increase the supply of capital that can be invested in development; aspects of foreign direct investment; informal credit markets; the impact of informal finance on development; how lessons learned from microfinance in developing countries can be applied to credit markets in the United States; and how to create institutions that can effectively deal with the problems inherent in lending to poor people in developing countries. The book is intended for policy makers and scholars interested in capital markets in developing and transition economies. It is also suitable for use as a supplementary text in upper level undergraduate courses on development finance.

Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Stuides, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research underway in specialized areas. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest continuing reference work in the field. Dolores Moyano Martin, of the Library of Congress Hispanic Division, has been the editor since 1977, and P. Sue Mundell has been assistant editor since 1994. The subject categories for Volume 55 are as follows: Anthropology (including Archaeology and Ethnology) Economics Electronic Resources for the Social Sciences Geography Government and Politics International Relations Sociology