In the 1950s, most Latin American countries were confronted with worsening economic problems that led a team of economists headed by Raúl Prebisch to attempt a comprehensive diagnosis of the regional condition. (Prebisch was secretary general of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, ECLA.) These investigations not only supplied a much needed set of empirical data, but gave rise to a dissident and highly original school of economic thought that came to be known as “structuralism.”
Octavio Rodríguez systematically reviews the evolution of these ideas during the 1950s and 1960s and shows that, although they comprised responses to a variety of concrete problems, the successive analyses of relations between the industrial “center” and the underdeveloped “periphery” countries attained a remarkable coherence. This review is well done and retrospectively adds rigor to the emerging ideas. A useful bibliography, with structuralist interpretations of chronic inflation, including those that originated outside ECLA, is appended.
In a critique of the structuralist contribution, Rodríguez concludes that while ECLA thought altered the framework of conventional neo-classical and post-Keynesian economics, it did not surpass the latter. He asserts that the ECLA school lacked an analysis of social and political relations and was ideologically linked to economic interests benefiting from industrialization under protection. ECLA thought, he says, became identified with populist political movements of the 1950s and 1960s and could not come to grips with a changing environment of class conflict, authoritarian government, and multinational corporate domination during the 1970s.
These criticisms by Rodríguez are arresting, but not adequately supported. In a brief prolog, Prebisch specifically disavows the ideological identification of ECLA with industrial interests, save as the latter happened to benefit from a dynamic process indispensable to general development. He also denies a populist bias, since populism failed to produce the penetrating analysis of social problems that was ECLA’s aim.
Writing from a German Marxist perspective, Tilman Evers seeks to provide a general theory of the state in the countries of the “capitalist periphery.” He attributes the manifold variations in regimes and policies to a basic ambiguity in the role of the bourgeois state in serving as the “incarnation of the general interest” and at the same time as the agent of international capitalist exploitation. The convoluted analysis, almost devoid of empirical content, is not convincing. Where so much is explained under the single rubric of “contradictions,” nothing is clarified. Curiously, in an extensive bibliography, Evers nowhere cites Prebisch, Osvaldo Sunkel, and Aníbal Pinto, key contributors to the “center-periphery” framework.
