Abstract

KALMANOVITZ, Salomón. CLIOMETRICS AND INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMIC HISTORY: LATIN AMERICAN REFLECTIONS. hist.crit. [online]. 2004, n.27, pp.63-89. ISSN 0121-1617.

This essay narrates the development of cliometrics and neo-institutional history in the United States and its problems of acceptance among Latin American academics in general and in Colombia in particular. There is rivalry between the two schools because they respond to somewhat different theoretical bases: whereas the former is based on neo- classical economic theory, the second questions its assumptions about the absence of frictions and institutions. Modern economic history had to compete with dependency theory in Latin America and only found some acceptance when the latter began to show problems of inconsistency, lack of rigour, absence of falseability tests, and inability to predict. Cliometrics was rejected from the start in Colombia, together with William P. McGreevey's Economic History of Colombia, and it took more than twenty years for it to recover recognition of its usefulness for understanding the past, while neo-institutional history is only just beginning to be accepted.

Keywords : cliometrics; neo-institutionalism; economic history; latin america; Colombia; douglass north.

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