ABSTRACT
This chapter is a preliminary effort to stimulate a debate on the compara tive study of the origins of central banking in Latin America, especially in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, with emphasis on an institutional framework analysis.2 The chapter also attempts to link some of these problems with the ongoing discussion among European economic histo rians on the origins and evolution of central banking in Europe from the nineteenth century, most notably as developed on a comparative basis by Charles Goodhart and by historians of the early history of central banks in other European countries (Goodhart, 1988).3 We pro pose that the antecedents and early history of central banking in Latin America are distinct and that it is misleading to think strictly in terms of evolutionary models both with respect to the origins of these banks, as well as to their initial operations beginning in the 1920s and 1930s.
