Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias

In this ambitious and comprehensive survey of the political economy of Brazil and Argentina since the 1990s, Felipe Antunes de Oliveira sets out to reorient our understanding of contemporary development in Latin America. Politics in these two countries, he argues, has been dominated in recent decades by the competition between neoliberals, who advocate market liberalization, and neodevelopmentalists, who seek to use the state as an agent of growth and distribution. Despite the apparent opposition between the “market and state utopias” of these two models, however, Antunes de Oliveira argues that they in fact share a flawed vision “of development as capitalist catch-up”: the undying belief that countries like Brazil and Argentina will reach levels of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita on par with the United States or Europe (p. 6). Instead, as he points out, since 1989 both Argentina's and Brazil's GDP per capita have declined slightly relative to...