Eighteen economists and social scientists, representing a dozen different nationalities from four continents, have made an impressive addition to the lengthening list of publications about economic integration in Latin America. The common denominator of the contributors would seem to lie in three attitudes: first, their concern with economic stagnation in less developed parts of the world; second, their disenchantment with the orthodox theories of economic development still fashionable in highly industrialized nations of the West; and third, their conviction that regional economic integration can reduce the dangerously widening gap described in Barbara Ward’s The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (New York, 1962).
Individual essays describe the origins and present structure of the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA) and the Central American Common Market (CACM). After striking a balance of their achievements and failures to date, the authors suggest why and how the problems confronting them must be solved soon, if LAFTA and CACM are to be successful in stimulating economic growth and industrialization in Latin America. Editor Wionczek pulls few punches in his provocative introductory essay. He complains, for instance, that “the active or passive enemies of Latin American integration are legion” (p. 16). This is especially true with respect to LAFTA, where he finds “no indication whatsoever that this odd coalition—made up of supernationalist politicians, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and industrialists of the old school, plus certain foreign interests—plan to give up” (p. 17).
The remaining eighteen papers are grouped under three general headings. Part One contains three essays dealing with theoretical approaches to economic integration. The authors of these do not explicitly mention Latin America, but they raise some pertinent challenges to traditional theories of international trade and development. LAFTA (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay) is analyzed from a wide variety of viewpoints in the twelve essays of Part Two. These include another by the editor and comprise more than two thirds of the book, reflecting the overwhelming concentration of Latin America’s human and natural resources in LAFTA. Familiar names, such as Argentina’s Raúl Prebisch, Chile’s Felipe Herrera, and Yale’s Robert Triffin, appear with those of less well-known but often equally articulate authorities. After the exhaustive treatment of LAFTA, the fortyodd pages about CACM in Part Three might seem anticlimactic. Yet CACM should not be lightly dismissed. Its five members (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) comprise a total area of 170,000 square miles (larger than California) and in 1960 they had almost eleven million inhabitants (more than Illinois) and a gross territorial product of three billion dollars. For reasons amply explained in the three papers about CACM, this organization has made much greater progress toward meaningful economic integration than LAFTA.
Some of the nineteen selections may prove heavy going for even the informed general reader. While bankers and professional economists will properly appreciate fine points of international trade and payments systems, these may be lost upon historians or political scientists. Notwithstanding, this book deserves adequate recognition as a valuable reference work in its own special field.
