Rhys Jenkins, who a decade ago wrote Dependent Industrialization in Latin America, a study of the automobile industry in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile, has now written a comprehensive study of the automobile industry throughout Latin America. The book is particularly welcome because the transformation of automobile manufacturing over the past 15 years has affected Latin America as much as the United States, Japan, and Europe.
The first half of the study covers “the period from the mid-fifties, when the first attempts to integrate the local assembly industry which already existed in some Latin American countries were made, to the early seventies.” The second half deals with the formation of a world auto industry out of what had been three major producing blocs (North America, Western Europe, and Japan), and traces the consequences for Latin America. In both, Jenkins argues, “it is the international context which [set] the bounds within which local accumulation and restructuring” took place (p. 237). While the changes have not simply been dictated by the handful of major transnational firms which dominate the world industry, the restructuring has been “congruent with their emerging strategies.”
In a final chapter, Jenkins offers several conclusions about what the future will bring: Latin America will not emerge as a major exporter of automotive products; the domination of the industry “by a small group of TNCs is likely to continue”; “Brazil and Mexico will continue to be the major markets and production centers in the region,” but “elsewhere in Latin America [except, perhaps, for Argentina and Venezuela] the prospects of the motor industry seem rather limited” (pp. 250-251).
A particular strength of the book is its integration of many topics that have tended to be separately discussed by others: the organization of the industry nationally and internationally, labor relations, the role of the state, market conditions, price formation, and capital accumulation. Jenkins paints a complex and convincing portrait of the role each of these has played in the restructuring.
Jenkins works from a theoretical perspective that is both coherent and distinctive, but he hardly ever makes it explicit. While this is a virtue in some respects, it also tends to obscure the points of divergence between his views and those of other scholars of the industry. This essay is a substantial contribution to our understanding of transnational corporations in developing countries.
