Bulmer-Thomas V., Coatsworth J., Cortes-Conde R. The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 2, The Long Twentieth Century

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c08 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 October 6, 2005 12:32

322 William R. Summerhill

Table 8.6. Merchant shipping registered in selected Latin

American countries, 1920 (1,000sofregistered tons)

Country

Merchant shipping

capacity steam

Merchant shipping

capacity sail

Argentina 140 20

Brazil 475 22

Chile 52 20

Cuba 44 –

Honduras 31 –

Mexico 42 –

Peru 33 22

Uruguay 52 18

Venezuela 4.9 –

Source: B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, the Americas,

1750–1988 (New York, 1993).

As trade expanded in Latin America, ships with a larger displacement,

and the large number of ships visiting Latin American ports, required port

expansion and improvements. Domestic merchant marine ﬂeets emerged

to augment foreign-owned shipping lines serving the region. Partial ﬁgures

on the volume of shipping registered in selected Latin American nations in

1920 are presented in Table 8.6.Unsurprisingly, the largest economies in

the aggregate possessed the most signiﬁcant commercial shipping ﬂeets.

By 1920, Latin America had long enjoyed access to modern shipping ser-

vices. Steam vessels appeared with growing frequency in the Rio de la Plata

already in the 1850s.

But by the 1870s and 1880s, with railways hauling

larger volumes of freight, much of it bound for export, countries confronted

bottlenecks at ports throughout the region. Facilities that were barely ade-

quate for the volume of trade in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century

proved wholly inadequate for the export booms of the last third of the

century. Infrastructure expansion in railways thus created derived demands

for port investments to handle larger volumes of commodity output. His-

torians have not yet supplied for ports the detailed empirical analog to the

literature on railways. It is known that port improvements appeared broadly

across Latin America. The simplest version of such improvements involved

Clifton B. Kroeber, The Growth of the Shipping Industry in the Rio de la Plata Region, 1794–1860

(Madison, WI, 1957), 129.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c08 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 October 6, 2005 12:32

The Development of Infrastructure 323

expanding the amount of dock space available. More complex versions of

upgrades were common and included not just dock construction but also

the dredging of channels, landﬁlls to provide more frontage, establishment

of dry docks and other repair facilities, and the creation of large warehouse

complexes.

Even still, the high-throughput requirements of modern trade out-

stripped the capacity that was available in many of Latin America’s tra-

ditional ports. This, combined with localized regional shifts in production,

led to secondary ports picking up an important share of commerce in the

larger countries. Competition between port cities further helped spur the

necessary increases in capacity for docking, loading, and discharging freight.

In Argentina, despite Buenos Aires’s early position as the country’s principal

port, by 1910,alarge increment of basic commodity trade went through

secondary port facilities rather than the capital city.

Puerto Madero’s

inauguration in the late 1880s was a response to the stunning export expan-

sion underway in Argentina.

It brought a signiﬁcant increase in the port

capacity for Buenos Aires. Puerto Madero’s opening in 1897 also bit into

the trade that had been growing at Ros

ario and other ports along the Rio de

la Plata, as the expanding rail network and the multitude of port facilities

provided shippers with new options for routing.

No estimate exists of the capital invested in port improvements or even

measures of the overall increase in the handling capacity for the period 1870–

1930.Some broad features are apparent from the descriptive literature. As

in the case of railroads, a mixed public and private effort underpinned Latin

American port projects. Some port operations and upgrades were done by

private concessionaires; others were executed directly by governments.

For instance, up until the 1860s, the port facilities along the Rio de la

Plata were mainly privately owned. With expansion of trade toward the

end of the century, government began to take on a broader scope of direct

responsibilities in many ports.

In Chile, bottlenecks appeared as nitrate extraction grew, and the trade

soon became limited by inadequate port facilities. Capacity increases

Lewis, British Railways, 210;Silvia B. L

azzaro, Estado, capital extranjero y sistema portuario argentino,

1880–1914 (Buenos Aires, 1992), 112.

Edgardo J. Rocca, El Puerto de Buenos Aires en la historia (Buenos Aires, 1996), 155–62.

Luis Dodero, La navegaci

on en la Cuenca del Plata y sus propulsores (Buenos Aires, 1961), 52–4.

azzaro, Estado, Capital extranjero;Joanne Fox Przeworski, The Decline of the Copper Industry in

Chile and the Entrance of North American Capital, 1870–1916 (New York, 1980), 137.

Kroeber, Growth of the Shipping Industry, 41–2.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c08 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 October 6, 2005 12:32

324 William R. Summerhill

between 1870 and 1912 allowed total shipping per year in Chilean ports

to jump from ﬁve million tons to more than ﬁfty million tons, a full order-

of-magnitude increase.

As was done in Brazilian shipping, on certain

routes, the Chilean government subsidized commercial rates to guarantee

service into ports in areas of secondary importance in commerce. In Brazil,

the extensive coastline meant that most regions of the country enjoyed rela-

tively good access to basic port facilities.

As the capacity of individual ships

increased and trade increased as a result of coffee cultivation, ﬁrst in Rio

de Janeiro and then later in S

ao Paulo, most shipping activity concentrated

in ports along the country’s southern coastline. Late nineteenth-century

port modernization and expansion concentrated in this region, and the

ports of Rio de Janeiro and Santos in particular underwent a series of

major expansions. Although publicly supervised, major ports like that of

Rio were privately administered. Contracts awarded for the administration

of the port changed hands at several points, suggesting that public author-

ities fostered a competitive environment as a way of securing better port

services.

Through public and private investments, Latin America’s ports increased

their capacity in the era of export-led growth. Demand-driven improve-

ments in shipping infrastructure made it possible for the region’s economies

to realize their comparative advantage in the trade in primary products. In

combination with the massive increase in inland transport services, port

modernization proved to be a central element in the transition to economic

growth throughout the region.

CONCLUSION: THE RISE OF MOTOR ROADS

AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE RAILWAY

The ﬁnancial difﬁculties that appeared in Latin America with the onset of

the First World War, which slowed railway expansion, came at a critical

historical moment in the development of modern transport technology.

The successful and cost-effective innovation of the internal combustion

engine, in combination with affordable petroleum fuel, provided a highly

ﬂexible mode of transport that both complemented and substituted railway

Przeworski, Decline of the Copper Industry, 148.

Brazil, Portos do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1926), passim.

Sergio Lamar

ao, Dostrapiches ao porto (Rio de Janeiro, 1991), 128–52.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c08 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 October 6, 2005 12:32

The Development of Infrastructure 325

Table 8.7. Motor vehicles in use in Latin America, 1930 (1,000s)

Country Passenger cars Commercial vehicles

Argentina 344 92

Bolivia 1.21

Brazil 133 67

Chile 28 15

Colombia 8.85

Costa Rica 1.40.5

Cuba 27 15

Ecuador 1.41

El Salvador 1.80.4

Guatemala 20.8

Honduras 0.70.4

Mexico 63 25

Nicaragua 10.2

Panama 6.31.7

Paraguay 0.71

Peru 8.75.2

Uruguay 37 10

Venezuela 11 6.8

Source: Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, the Americas, 1750–

1988.

services. Cars and trucks were not only competitive means of movement

for both passengers and certain classes of freight but also had the advantage

of point-to-point delivery, which could never be emulated by railways. The

appearance of motor vehicles in Latin America thus opened a new chapter

in the transportation revolution in the region.

Yet the successful diffusion of automobiles in Latin America depended

on the existence of trafﬁcable routes, which was the very same issue that

bedeviled early nineteenth-century transport improvements. Exploiting the

advantages of motor vehicles thus required attention to the question of

roads and required a level of investment in them that had never previously

existed in Latin America. Table 8.7 provides indicators of the numbers

of motor vehicles in use throughout the region at the end of the period

under consideration by. No measures of aggregate road mileage or public

investments in highways are available for Latin America as a whole. The

ﬁgures in Table 8.7 reveal expected tendencies. Economies that were larger,

in the aggregate, had greater numbers of motor vehicles in service. All

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c08 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 October 6, 2005 12:32

326 William R. Summerhill

indications are that these countries undertook considerable investments in

public highway infrastructure following the First World War. In postrevo-

lutionary Mexico during a rapidly expanding public investment effort, the

share of government investments directed to roadways increased from 7.3

percent in 1925 to more than 30 percent in 1937.

In Brazil, by 1915, the

federal budget provided funds for road construction, and additional subsi-

dies soon followed. State governments in the Old Republic independently

pursued their own road construction programs energetically in the 1920s,

providing both feeder roads to existing rail lines and new highways that

permitted direct movement over longer distances by truck.

For many categories of goods, shipment by road even today remains

less viable than shipment by rail, especially with respect to the products of

mining and forestry. Yet for most other goods, and for passengers, trucks,

cars, and buses provided a powerful competitive force against railways. In

the six decades since 1870, Latin American countries had come full circle

with their infrastructure requirements, from crude highways whose need

for improvement was obviated by the iron horse, through the complete

cycle of railway expansion, then back to roads in order to accommodate

the new means of locomotion. By 1930, there was much about the mobility

of people and commerce in Latin America that had changed and, along

with it, both the level and structure of economic activity. Yet, by that

point, the railways, which still did most of the heavy lifting in providing

transport services, were no longer seen as the central component of future

infrastructure expansion. The way forward for large sectors of many Latin

American economies and, for both exports and the domestic economy,

became the highway.

Enrique C

ardenas, La industrializaci

on mexicana durante la gran depresi

on (Mexico City, 1987), 155.

Richard Downes, “Autos over Rails: How U.S. Business Supplanted the British in Brazil, 1910–1928,”

Journal of Latin American Studies 24, 3 (October 1992): 551–83.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c09 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 September 30, 2005 14:53

Part III

FACTOR ENDOWMENTS

327

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c09 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 September 30, 2005 14:53

328

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

P1: GDZ

0521812909c09 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 September 30, 2005 14:53

ECONOMIC GROWTH

AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

otto t. solbrig

INTRODUCTION

Economic activity inevitably alters the natural environment. Lately, there

has been a great deal of concern that increased human activity is having

effects on the natural environment that may be irreversible, with possibly

negative effects on human societies, such as the loss of the ozone layer or

global warming. But what is the environment?

Environment is not an easy concept to deﬁne. In a fundamental and very

general sense, the environment is the surroundings of an object. However,

to distinguish between an object and its environment is an abstraction

because in nature nothing stands alone and all objects are linked through

material and energy ﬂows.

The environment is then an abstraction, a human construct. For most

persons, the environment is the physical and biological surroundings: land

(lithosphere), water (hydrosphere), air (atmosphere), and wildlife (bio-

sphere) in their different manifestations. There is less agreement as to

whether aspects of human societies – such as poverty or income inequality –

can also be considered part of the environment of an activity. Increasingly,

the tendency is to consider them part of the environment, the so-called

social environment. An economic history of the environment is conse-

quently a history of the modiﬁcations effected by humans on their physical

and biological surroundings and, to a lesser extent, on society.

The use of the term environment in the aforementioned sense is relatively

new. The older literature speaks of nature. Yet nature is a more restricted

term because it refers only to the physical and biological aspects of the sur-

roundings of an object. Furthermore, it implies an existence independent

329

P1: GDZ

0521812909c09 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 September 30, 2005 14:53

330 Otto T. Solbrig

from the object being studied. The term environment is also related concep-

tually to that of development.

Until the middle of the twentieth century,

humans conquered nature in quest of economic gain. With the implan-

tation of the development paradigm, the approach is that development is

limited by environmental constraints.

This represents an important con-

ceptual shift.

The physical and biological environment provides the resources that

sustain human existence: food and water, ﬁbers and skins for clothing,

materials for shelter and tools, and fuel. Given its importance for human

existence, from ancient time, nature has been provided with religious, eth-

ical, and esthetical value. These estimations determine how human soci-

eties perceive the environment and condition the methods they employ

to extract resources from their surroundings. Yet human societies, regard-

less of their religious or ethical values, have modiﬁed the environment

by gathering, hunting, cultivating, logging, mining, and building. Other-

wise people could not survive. As human societies have grown in num-

bers and their economic activities multiplied, the rate of extraction of

resources from the environment has increased by several orders of mag-

nitude. When most of the population was rural, the role of nature was

clearly understood. Today, with a mostly urban population, the connection

between economic growth and environmental change is not always clearly

comprehended.

We call the physical and biological elements of an area and their mutual

interactions the ecosystem of such an area. This can refer to a small area,

as small as a drop of water, or it can encompass the entire Earth. Ecologists

are very aware that the world’s natural ecosystem is a thermodynamically

open system, which depends on the capture by green plants of solar energy.

This energy then circulates through the ecosystem, fueling the work under-

taken by all organisms in their daily life. Humans are no exception. It has

been calculated that humans utilize at present 7 percent of the world’s

photosynthetic energy to feed themselves and their domestic animals, but

affect indirectly around 40 percent of the solar energy captured by plants.

In addition, human societies are utilizing fossil energy, which is the solar

energy captured by plants in the past. Consequently, over half the energy

that circulates through the Earth at present ﬂows through a system that

W. S achs, “Global Ecology and the Shadow of ‘Development,’” in W. Sachs, ed., Global Ecology

(Halifax, 1993).

D. H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament

of Mankind (New York, 1972).

P1: GDZ

0521812909c09 CB929-Bulmer 0 521 81290 9 September 30, 2005 14:53

Economic Growth and Environmental Change 331

is either entirely human made, or is inﬂuenced in its behavior by human

societies. This is an unprecedented situation in the Earth’s history.

But although open thermodynamically, the Earth is a closed system in

relation to material ﬂows. In nature, all materials cycle, albeit at different

rates. People depend on the natural processes that cycle nitrogen, carbon,

water, phosphorous, and other essential elements. Humans make use of

these processes that have been called ecosystem services when they dump

wastes into rivers, oceans, landﬁlls, and the atmosphere, which nature even-

tually turns ﬁrst into harmless compounds and then reduces to its basic

elements, which are then recycled.

Until now, this process of relying on the natural ecosystem to capture

solar energy and circulate wastes has worked very well and human societies

have adapted to it. Yet there are many signs that point out that, as the

human economic system has grown and the natural ecosystem has shrunk,

the system is beginning to fail. The accumulation of carbon dioxide and

other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a clear sign that the natural

system cannot cycle carbon out of the atmosphere at the same rate that it

is inputted. Likewise, the accumulation of oxides of nitrogen (NO

)inthe

atmosphere, in water, and on land is a sign of the inability of the ecosystem

to cycle nitrogen compounds at the same rate as human societies eject them.

The consumption of energy and materials and the production of wastes

are not evenly distributed among nations and regions. Europe, the United

States, and Japan have clearly exceeded the capacity of their remaining nat-

ural ecosystems to provide the needed ecological services. A clear indication

of this is their need to import fossil energy, minerals, and, in the case of

Europe and Japan, also food. Other regions of the world are net exporters

of these products, hastening the disintegration of their own natural ecosys-

tems’ capacity as they export natural capital. Historically, Latin America

has been such a region.

With industrialization and globalization,

the environmental impact of

humans has changed in intensity and scope. Before the industrial era, most

human activities had only a local impact and very occasionally a regional

impact. Increasingly, the scale of the imprint has enlarged and today we deal

with truly global effects such as the thinning of the ozone layer, the increase

in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and global warming. The enlarged scale of

John Coatsworth, “Cycles of Globalization, Economic Growth and Human Welfare in Latin

America,” in Otto Solbrig, R. Paarlberg, and F. di Castri, eds., Globalization and the Rural Envi-

ronment (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 23–48.