Wealth, Development, and Social Inequalities in Latin America

Hans-Jürgen Burchardt is Chair of the Department of International and Inter-Society Relations at the University of Kassel, Germany. He has many years of experience with joint projects and international cooperation. He was and is project leader of several university partnerships in Argentina, Chile, Cuba and Venezuela and has conducted various research projects in Latin America. As German director of the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS), he is in charge of four Latin American regional centers at universities of excellence and is director of the Kassel Latin America Center CELA. For more than 15 years he has been researching questions of international environmental and raw materials policy, North-South relations, sustainability, and development theory with a focus on Latin America.Irene Lungo Rodríguez is Scientific Coordinator of the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) Laboratory Confronting Inequalities in Latin America: Perspectives on Wealth and Power. She completed a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universidad National de Mexico (UNAM) and is part of the National System of Researchers- SNI-CONACYT-Mexico.

"In Latin America, most research on inequality and sustainability still focuses on the study of poverty and social and socio-ecological exclusion. While these are fundamental issues to understand the great challenges facing Latin America, it is also necessary to address the other side of the coin: wealth. In the region income and wealth is more concentrated among the wealthy than anywhere else in the world. This book illuminates this reality by presenting deep insights and new methodological perspectives on an under-explored topic in Latin American studies: Wealth and its economic, political, and cultural dimensions."Diego Sánchez Ancochea, Professor of Political Economy of Development, University of Oxford

• Introduction: Wealth, inequalities, and sustainable development in Latin America Part 1: Economics of Wealth 1. Natural Resource Wealth, Its Problems, and What Can Be Done about them 2. Extractivism, Nature, and Wealth: Unequal Specialization and the Modernization of Elite Rule in Latin America 3. Agrarian Capitalism and Land Ownership: The Case of Uruguay 4. Tax systems and concentration of wealth: the problems of the Mexican tax system Part 2: Politics of Wealth 5. Wealth, Inequality, and Democracy in Latin America: A methodological approach 6. The Names of Power: How to Define Latin American Economic Elites? 7. The Wealth Defense Industry: An Exploration of the Role of Intermediaries in the Financial and Tax Fields in Economic Concentration 8. Elites and Development in Natural Resource-Exporting Countries – Experiences from Ecuador Part 3: Culture of Wealth 9. Privilege and Wealth in Latin America: Bridging Culture and Political Economy 10. Wealth Studies, Whiteness, and Family Dynasties in Latin America: Preliminary Reflections 11. "How does it feel to be a solution?" The Relationship between Wealth and Whiteness in Latin America 12. Object of attraction: The Wife, the Dowry, and the Distribution of Wealth in 19th Century Mexico