"Carmenza Gallo has wrought three minor miracles: she has made sense of Bolivia‘s arcane politics by looking seriously at the state’s bases of fiscal and popular support: she has challenged our conventional wisdom concerning the relative vulnerability of export-oriented domestic economies to oligarchic control and military power; she has provided a new basis for examining state formation in Latin America. Her greatest innovation has been to introduce taxation and government finance as both causes and effects of state-class relations.... In a day of debt crisis and fiscal reorganization among Third World states, the issues she raises have a very contemporary ring."
—Charles Tilly, New School for Social Research
In this interpretation of Bolivia’s political and social development, Carmenza Gallo focuses on the impact of the Bolivian tax code and its relationship to class structure. She argues that differences in state formation in primary export economies merge from variation of three main elements: class structure; the economic base and the export sector’s degree of integration into the domestic economy; and the reliance of fiscal resources on export sectors. Gallo produces a more complete view of the state’s responses to internal and international circumstances and a better understanding of the conditions under which officials of weak states, like Bolivia, act independently of upper classes.