CEPAL Review - Volume 1978, Issue 5, 1978

In recent years widespread interest has been shown in the development strategy which focuses on the satisfaction of basic needs. However, the sympathy that its content of social justice arouses should be no bar to critical analysis whereby attention can be drawn to the operational and strategic difficulties it entails.

If the social sciences are conditioned by the real circumstances in the midst of which they emerge, and their recent manifestations occur in Latin America, these can only be properly explained within the frame of reference of the changes which have taken place in the region. Specifically, certain key points must be raised in the context of the technocratic order that has come to dominate the fundamental institutions: what conceptions are currently predominant in the social sciences and why, what counter-ideas arc brought forward to oppose them, and what is the probable evolution of each.

Since the mid-1960s a radical change has come about in international financial flows which has placed commercial banks at the heart of the process. It is they that handled substantial funds deriving from the expansion of the Eurocurrency market and later recycled a considerable portion of the surpluses generated by OPEC; and for several reasons, paramount among which is the expectation of profit, they have channelled a considerable proportion of these resources towards the developing countries. The article analyses the positive and negative effects of this process on the nations in question. On the one hand, it has relieved the external bottleneck, increased the capacity to import, provided incentives to investment and economic growth, made it possible to weather the oil price crises, and afforded freedom from the constraints of official loans. Hut, on the other hand, it has also increased dependence upon foreign capital and debt service requirements, and has ‘commercialized’ development financing, this last consequence generally implies more onerous loans with variable rates of interest, shorter terms, less tolerance, ‘commercial’ criteria for estimating a country’s creditworthiness, and intervention of banks in government policy. In face of these negative effects, the author proposes a series of remedial measures, of which the most outstanding is to augment the available funds of multilateral financial institutions with resources from the central countries and from OPEC.

The essential object of this article is to put some order into the discussion of the informal sector. Since the ILO adopted the new term, there has been a spate of somewhat entangled discussion which has at least served to reanimate the debate on underdevelopment and give a better grasp of the relevant problems and solutions. The aim here is to study the limited but crucial question of the relations maintained by the informal sector with the rest of the economy.

This article presents in some detail a general conceptual framework intended to provide guidelines for the study of negotiations between governments and transnational corporations in connexion with export-oriented primary commodities. If the developing countries have greatly improved their bargaining position vis-á-vis the transnational corporations during the past few decades, this is due not only to changes in economic and political power relations at the world level but also to the pooling of increasingly detailed knowledge of all the factors which strengthen the hand of the governments in their dealings with the corporations.

There is now an abundant literature on the need to protect the prices of the developing countries’ primary export products, but few studies trace in detail the evolution of these prices through all the stages of production and marketing up to that of final consumption in the central countries. The purpose of the present article is to examine this process with reference to coffee, a product which is of great importance in Latin America’s foreign trade, and whose final price, as is common knowledge, has risen significantly in recent years. The data considered lead the author to conclude that much of the increase has occurred in the consumer countries, where, of course, a major proportion of the surplus thus generated has remained.

A number of studies have confirmed that in all capitalist * economies which have attained a certain degree of industrial development a segmentation of the urban formal labour market occurs, one of the consequences of which is greater inequality in wages and salaries. The author explains this phenomenon by postulating as a general hypothesis that the level of remunerations is determined by the overt or latent conflict between entrepreneurs and workers, and that many of the changes in the industrial structure derive from the efforts of entrepreneurs to obviate its destabilizing effects.

1. A ‘new’ IMF appears to be just now in process of emerging. If so, it will probably possess at least four central characteristics, namely: (a) it will be endowed with a significantly larger volume of loanable resources than before; (b) it will dispense those resources as part of a deliberate global policy primarily in order to find a way of recycling OPEC surpluses more efficiently than before; (c) it will undertake those new lending functions with a greater degree of ‘conditionality’ than before; and finally, (d) it will be granted a greater degree of ‘surveillance’ authority in so doing. These judgements stem from the following lines of reasoning.