Essay on Political and Economic Development in Latin America- compare Brazil and Argentina
writing a short essay (of say four to five, typed, double-spaced pages) which
compares the trajectory of two Latin American or Caribbean countries. Your assignment is to select two countries in
the region that you feel warrant comparison.
Trace out their contemporary history, highlighting “variables” that you
conclude explain different outcomes.
Your essay should have a clear thesis (presented in your
introduction), supporting evidence in the body of your essay, and a
conclusion. You may attach figures and
tables if they are relevant to your argument.
Please make sure that you identify all your sources of information. I prefer to see the sources listed in end
notes.
You should be able to employ many of the terms and concepts
we have studied throughout our course, ranging from exports, imports,
remittances, capital flows, fiscal policy, monetary policy, inflation,
devaluation, economic growth, and inequality.
You should also demonstrate sensitivity to political trends—above all
the presence of conflict—and their impact on economic performance. More generally, the quality of political
leadership is important. Finally, you should take into consideration the place
of the two countries you study in the world economy, and the security of their
niches in the world economy.
Your thesis statement should be clear and specific. A thesis is an argument, and an argument is
more than a statement of fact. It is an
opinion, and it will be your opinion, but one that you will support with
evidence: analysis, and facts and figures.
For evidence you should use indicators.
Indicators can measure social welfare.
Examples include literacy rates, life expectancy, and percentage of
girls enrolled in schools. Indicators
also exist for economic performance, including per capita income, percentage of
the population with access to the internet, and growth of gross domestic
production (GDP). There are also
indicators of political performance: elections, alterations in power of
political parties, presence or absence of protests and riots, and levels of
corruption. You can find quantitative
data for many kinds of indicators by using the data banks of such institutions
as the World Bank and the Economic Commission for Latin American and the
Caribbean (ECLAC, but better known by its Spanish-language acronym,
CEPAL). You can access these data banks
though the internet: worldbank.org (look for “browse by country or indicator”)
and www.cepal.org
(look for “data and statistics”).
Transparency International is an international organization that ranks
the countries of the world by their level of corruption. Other international organizations are also
valuable sources of information.
Your essay
should be constructed with well-developed paragraphs; they are the “building
blocks” of an essay. Each of your
paragraphs should have one central idea, expressed in the first sentence (in
what is called a topic sentence). There
should be four to six sentences in each paragraph. Paragraphs have been called “compositions in
minature”: each paragraph thus has an argument (expressed at the beginning),
evidence (in the body), and a concluding sentence (the last sentence) that ties
everything together and reminds us of the purpose of the paragraph.
Your paper should be neat,
with a title page (complete with a title).
Avoid contractions and colloquial words and expressions. Number pages (though not the title
page). Do not use “I,” “you,” or
“we”—just say what you have to say.
Do your best work.
Pace yourself. Start early on the
project and give yourself the necessary time to write a cogent and polished
essay. You should have multiple drafts,
each of which you proofread, making necessary revisions. (In graduate school at Cornell I was told,
“There are no one draft wonders.”)