9 - Conclusions

Summary

This book has addressed the puzzle of how economies can grow amid political violence and disorder. In order to resolve this puzzle, we employed a somewhat heterodox approach, combining methods from history, economics, and political science. We concluded that political instability does not have a systematic impact on economic performance.

The resulting approach to evidence and theory – what some researchers call an analytic narrative – involved three steps: we built a theoretical framework; we gathered systematic quantitative and qualitative data about a polity – Mexico from 1876 to 1929 – that passed from a long period of political stability into a prolonged period of instability; and we used our theoretical framework, coupled to analytic techniques drawn from economics, to analyze the historical evidence in a coherent manner. We specified explicit hypotheses and the counterfactual propositions that emanate from them and then compared the results that one should expect from theory with the results that were obtained in the real world. The result is a book that offers, on the one hand, an analytic economic history of Mexico and, on the other, a generalizable model of the interaction of political institutions and economic performance.

We would venture that the combination of methods and evidence that we have employed is outside the mainstream of research in all three fields on which we have rather shamelessly trespassed. Our trespassing across disciplinary boundaries requires that we say something at this point about the implications of our substantive findings for each of these disciplines.