CEPAL Review - Volume 1982, Issue 17, 1982

The efforts to incorporate the ‘social dimension’ into development policy or to formulate alternative styles of development are constrained not only by suppositions concerning the rationality and benevolence of governments and their accessibility to generalized advice but also by the feasibility of offering practical prescriptions for development without prior agreement on a theory of societal change.

The dynamism shown by Latin American exports as from 1975 led to the expectation that, if such a growth rate could be maintained, the region would eventually recover to some extent the share it had enjoyed in world trade during the 1950s.

The travelling conditions of all the city-dwellers of Latin America are made more difficult by high levels of congestion, but the lower-income strata are in a particularly negative position, since they are usually limited to the use of buses and thus have to spend a larger proportion of their time and money on travelling than the better-off sectors of the population.

During the past thirty years, the manufacture of capital goods has undergone considerable quantitative and qualitative development in Latin America.

Various studies carried outatCEPAL between 1950 and 1980, especially by Raúl Prebisch, have attempted to probe into the principal laetors influencing the absorption of labour in Latin America, with special emphasis on the rate of capital accumulation and economic growth, the type of technology used, the proportion of the labour force employed at low levels of productivity and, more recently, the consequences of the mechanisms of appropriation and utilization of the surplus which are an integral part of peripheral capitalism.

In his recent articles, and especially in his latest book (Capitalismo periférico. Crisis y transformación, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1981), the author pays special attention to the role played by monetary mechanisms in peripheral capitalism and to the meaning and limits of their use by the monetary authority.

The international economic and financial crisis is one of the main sources of present concern, particularly as there are no generally accepted solutions for dealing with it. This article is therefore of special interest in that it seeks not only to describe the main features of the crisis but also to suggest some ways of tackling it.