CEPAL Review - Volume 1981, Issue 15, 1981

This article reproduces, with a few changes, the Report which the author presented to the nineteenth session of CEPAL in his capacity as Executive Secretary of the Commission.

At its nineteenth session, held in Montevideo in May 1981, the CEPAL Secretariat submitted a report entitled “Latin American Development in the 1980s”, for the main purpose of collaborating with the governments of the region in the preparation of a regional programme of action in relation to the new International Development Strategy.

The main objective of this article is to study the role played by consumption in the economic and political strategies followed in recent years in tire countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America. The author places at the centre of his analysis an apparent paradox whose significance he seeks to discover: on the one hand, these societies display a considerable increase in the consumption of durable goods and other ‘sophisticated’ articles, primarily acquired through imports, and this is usually presented as a manifestation of the success of such strategies, but on the other hand, the same societies also display both growing inequality in the distribution of wealth and income and a deterioration in the degree of coverage of the basic needs of the poorest strata.

The successful export strategics of some South-East Asian countries have been raised in certain Latin American circles to the level of veritable paradigms and it is held that our region shoidd imitate these processes in order to achieve high rates of growth of production, employment, productivity and even real remuneration. For this reason, it is of particular interest to analyse the policies, institutional machinery, and domestic and international social and political conditions within the framework of which these cases have taken place.

The productive absorption of the labour force has always been one of CEPAL’s top priorities, not only because it indicates a rise in the level of productivity but also because it serves as a basis for a more equitable distribution of the benefits of development.

The concept of integration dates back a long time, although it has been used as an economic term only since the Second World War, when it was used to explain one of the objectives of the programmes for the reconstruction of Europe. Since its distant origins, its meaning has changed according to circumstances, which justifies an exploration of its various meanings in order to give them a sense appropriate to the present circumstances.

In all his recent writings, the author has maintained that neoclassical thinking is not only incapable of explaining the structure and operation of capitalism in the periphery, but has a misguiding influence on economic policy decisions. In the present article he reverts to these ideas, formulating them as if they came up in the course of a dialogue carried out with followers of the two leading contemporary mentors of the thinking in question; thus he is able to present his points of view with the fluid simplicity in which strictly academic essays are often lacking.