Some years ago I thought it would be interesting to write a paper mapping the “varieties of capitalism” framework onto contemporary Latin America to see what might be gained. Quite a bit, it turned out, which started me on a much longer engagement, initially with the pathbreaking work by Peter Hall and David Soskice, and then beyond with the broader and growing field of comparative capitalism.

Nearly all of this field is preoccupied with distinctions among developed countries, especially liberal and coordinated economies, with occasional reference to Asia but little or nothing to the rest of the world, including Latin America. At a minimum, I thought, here was a golden opportunity to connect Latin America back to these innovative debates on comparative capitalism. The lingua franca in this field includes terms like “institutional complementarities,” “patient capital,” “firm-specific skills,” and “interfirm coordination,” as well as a host of other concepts that can illuminate analyses of the political economy of Latin America and then link these analyses back to comparisons with the wider world.