The three Latin American countries, Chile, Colombia and Peru, were in need of active industrial policies by the 2000s. First and foremost, they needed to diversify their export and industrial structure. Since the year 2000, dependence on the primary commodity exports of these South American...

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different policies aimed at, primarily, but not exclusively, fostering industrialization....