Latin American Economic History, Business History and Economics of Enterprise: Current trends

Recent studies about Latin American business are worried about their position on the emerging and global economies. In this article we want to remark the important role of the universities, institutes, schools, and research centers in Latin America that make possible the research work and the publication of Bulletins, Journals and books on business history. In this way, we observe the recent activities of associations and international groups that focus in Latin American Business History in the last twenty five years. We identify the advances and goals in this arena and agreed with Carlos Davila about the thematic diversity and the need to achieve methodological rigor and theoretical propositions. For this reason, we emphasize the historical role of Latin American enterprises and the role of the family business, and their position in the global economies. This article has a double aim, on the one hand, we offer an overview and a state of the art about Latin American Business History. And, on the other hand, we emphasize, within the field of Latin American business, emergent studies that show the potential of this discipline to participate in broader debates about innovation, corporate governance and learning.