Is Geography Destiny?: Lessons from Latin America by John Luke. Gallup, Eduardo Lora, John Luke Gallup

From the Publisher

“...It is a very illustrative example of how geography is being reincorporated into other fields of investigation, and geographers should be aware of the ways in which this is being accomplished.”—Progress in Human Geography
“Latin America presents us with two fascinating natural experiments on how geography influences economic development. The ‘outer experiment’ compares different countries, while the ‘inner experiment’ compares different zones within the same country. This book’s account of all these comparisons will appeal to anyone interested in economic development in general, and in Latin America in particular.” —Jared Diamond,author of Guns, Germs, and Steel

Foreign Affairs

It has long been a conundrum: Why, with so rich a natural resource base, did Latin America slip so far behind Europe and North America in terms of economic development? And why, even among developing countries, are inequalities greater in Latin America than in other regions? Over the last decade, recycled culturalist arguments, stripped of their original racist and anti-Catholic language, have held sway. The influence of geography on Latin American development is not a new topic either — after all, the philosophes posed this question in the eighteenth century. This valuable study's novel approach is to look at the intersection between physical characteristics, such as climate, topography, and soil quality, and economic and social development indicators. Latin America includes an enormous variety of climates and ecozones, and the authors address a remarkable range of factors, from tropical soils and land productivity to disease, urbanization, and access to world markets, that vary widely both within individual countries and across the region, reminding readers that geographic factors must be taken into account when making policy.

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