This is the Spanish edition, revised and updated by the author, of Distorted Development: Mexico in the World Economy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). David Barkin’s book is a discussion of Mexican economic development in the postwar period in general and the 1980s in particular. The context is neoliberal economic and structural adjustment policies in Latin America, leading to far greater openness to and integration with the world economy; therein, the author points out the income, equity, and developmental failings of recent Mexican economic policy.
Barkin’s positive policy proposal, which he calls an “economy of war” because of its likeness to policies implemented in the United Kingdom and the United States during World War II, advocates a return to the popular agricultural sector as the basis for Mexican economic progress. To maximize the utilization of resources, Barkin argues for minimum agricultural prices high enough to stimulate much greater production; for higher minimum wages, especially in urban areas, to guarantee demand for the additional agricultural (and industrial) output; and for a call for popular mobilization equivalent to wartime appeals for home-front action. Aside from its positive employment and income consequences, such a program would help resolve balance of payments problems by reducing food imports and providing more supply for export. It would ease budget deficit problems by providing more taxable income.
Following the author’s preface and introduction, the book is organized into six chapters. They address the end of food self-sufficiency; environmental degradation; balance of payments issues, including capital flight, contraband, and the problems of financing development; the limits and contradictions of the Mexican model of capitalist development; the destabilizing consequences of recent macro-economic stabilization policies; and the author’s “economy of war” proposal. The book provides much useful information on the difficulties of the postwar Mexican model of development. These date from the early 1970s; they were masked by the oil boom of the late 1970s, but they reached a crescendo with the debt crisis and subsequent opening of the Mexican economy in the 1980s. Barkin’s proposal is a call not for a return to the past, but for state-led popular mobilization of resources, with price incentives, to correct the distortions resulting from recent policies of integration into the world economy. As such, his book raises the very serious question of how distinctively Mexican resources can be mobilized to solve Mexican development problems, given the limitations of national economic strategies that rely excessively on foreign investors and foreign markets.
