Weintraub's book is a study of the decisions by Mexican policy-makers that led to the peso crisis of 1994. The study is premised on the hypothesis that it was the culture of Mexican policy-makers that led them to make the bad decisions that caused the Mexican peso to collapse in value. Specifically, he argues that a culture of arrogance led the policy-makers to ignore information that would have warned them away from making these decisions.

Weintraub begins the book with an exposition of the culture of Mexican economic policy-makers in the early 1990s. This chapter of the book develops a sociological explanation of a kind of groupthink that developed among policy elites, which prevented the decision-makers from listening to anyone outside of their circle. Because the inner circle of policy-makers developed a mistaken picture of the economic realities for Mexico, their unwillingness to listen caused them to make bad decision after bad decision, which resulted in a chain of economic disasters for Mexico.

The remainder of the book is a highly detailed and exhaustive blow-by-blow description of how economic decisions were made in Mexico and the economic consequences of those decisions. It contains a wealth of information on the series of events that surrounded the peso crisis. I would imagine that this book will come to be a very useful reference for those interested in this important event in the history of Mexico and the development of emerging markets.

While Weintraub's book is very informative and insightful, it does not provide all that it could. The lack of a generalizable analytical model means that the book is useful for explaining the Mexican peso crisis but offers little in terms of understanding other crises in emerging markets, of which there have been plenty. Had Weintraub provided a model that laid out the circumstances under which one would expect policy-makers to adopt the attitudes that Mexican policy-makers did, the book could have made a broader contribution.

The Ross volume is a study of the reasons why timber booms seem to lead policy-makers in developing countries to squander their natural resources. Ross is interested in knowing, on a theoretical level, what leads political actors to disregard institutions (read: rules) to which they have assented, such as forest conservation agreements. He looks specifically at the Indonesian, Malaysian, and Philippine cases. He develops a rational-choice explanation that argues that when the price for a commodity goes up to a certain level, policy-makers with authority over that commodity may become rent-seizers. Rent-seizers control the rights to allocate rents to others. In other words, when a commodity such as timber appreciates a lot, and there is great wealth to be had from its sale, policy-makers will want to take control of the distribution of that commodity to bring themselves financial gain. This results in a depletion of the commodity at a rapid rate.

Ross's argument is compelling and well presented. He makes a lucid case for his logic and avoids unnecessary formalization. His case studies are thorough and well written. He does a very good job of tying the analytical model and the case-study material together. The Ross volume gives the reader what the Weintraub volume does not: a generalizable analytical framework. The Ross model could be applied to any resources in any country. This is an important contribution and makes the book one that will garner much attention from those interested in natural-resource management and economic development.

While the Ross book is a fine piece of analysis, the case selection for the empirical portion of the book is a bit puzzling. The author picks three Southeast Asian countries to show how they all went through the same process of institutional breakdown. He says he wants to compare like with like in order to have confidence that he is comparing similar phenomena in his cases. He himself admits that this narrow range of cases limits the generality of his findings. One wonders what the results would have been if the author had examined countries that were not so similar in region, culture, or other factors that could have explanatory power.

Both of these books make solid contributions to the study of the political economy of development. They are careful, well-argued studies of what can go wrong in emerging markets. These books are recommended for anyone, from the undergraduate to the policy expert, who is interested in the politics of economic policy-making in the developing world.