Mauricio Font, The State and the Private Sector in Latin America: The Shift to Partnership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. xvi + 302, £55.00, hb.
concept of elites used here is arguably overly broad. It focuses more on political than economic elites and therefore fails to distinguish between them when their interests sometimes diverge (as is arguably the case in Bolivia since Morales’ showdown with the autonomistas in Santa Cruz in ). There is also not much consideration of the huge increase in the power of economic elites (especially extractive ones) in Peru since the privatisation and deregulation of the s and how this influences state policy. Finally, it is a shame that, despite the dates included in the title of the book, there is no chapter that offers a comparison of the very different political trajectories of the two countries since . These would seem to confirm rather than negate Vergara’s thesis. Whatever the criticisms that can be levelled at Vergara’s methods and findings, this is certainly an important book, one which will stand as a marker in the literature. Hopefully it will stimulate more by way of informed, historically-driven comparative analysis between two countries which, despite some obvious similarities, exhibit such divergent patterns of state-society relations.