CEPAL Review - Volume 1979, Issue 9, 1979

With the end of the 1970s at hand, by way of drawing up a general balance the author sketches the main features of Latin American development in the recent past and notes the main challenges which the region will have to face in the years to come. He begins by recognizing that since the war, and especially during the 1960s and the beginning of the present decade, Latin America achieved vigorous economic growth, but he stresses that this did not succeed in solving some of the most serious social problems, while it also brought with it a growing internationalization of the economies of the region, with a consequent increase in their external vulnerability. Furthermore, towards the middle of the 1970s there was a reversal of the expansive cycle as a result of the flagging performance of the central economies, the changes in the international prices of some goods, especially oil, and the internal difficulties faced by the national development patterns themselves.

It is an accepted fact that the process of internationalization of the world economy has expanded considerably in the last few decades. The author begins by examining the historical background of this process, and after emphasizing that it is not limited to the economic sphere —since it is also seen in the international dissemination of ideas, institutions and ways of life— he goes on to analyse in particular the economic internationalization recorded since the Second World War. After thus defining his subject, he reviews various expressions of internationalization in trade, capital movements, investments, the activities of transnational enterprises, and so on, with special attention to the way in which this process has influenced the periphery.

The executives of the big private banks feel very satisfied with their growing role in the financing of the less developed countries and furthermore consider that there is a general harmony of interests between borrowers and lenders: a sense of satisfaction which is shared by an appreciable number of economists and officials responsible for formulating policies both in the developed and the under-developed countries.

Many developing countries have been applying export promotion policies during, the last fifteen years. Among them, mention may be made of Brazil, Colombia, Hong Kong, Israel, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Yugoslavia. The conditions, timing, mechanisms and effects differ from one case to another and cover a broad range of political and economic models. The variety displayed by the various kinds of past experience show above all that export promotion is not exclusively linked to a given model.

José Medina Echavarría is one of the most important sociologists of Latin America, and he was the sociologist who has exerted most influence in CEPAL, where he worked with minor interruptions from 1952 until his death in 1977. This article seeks to give an overall view of his work, with the central purpose of showing the mainstream that is to be found by the serious reader of Medina’s work.