CEPAL Review - Volume 1984, Issue 22, 1984

In this article, the Executive Secretary of ecla gives an overview of the evolution of the region’s economy during the past year, looking at production, employment, inflation, and especially the external sector.

At the recent Latin American Economic Conference (Quito, 9 to 13 January 1984), twentysix representatives of Latin American and Caribbean countries signed the “Declaration of Quito” and a “Plan of Action”, documents proposing concerted action to face up to the crisis and the adoption of various measures to reactivate the economy and cope with the external debt.

About two years ago, the ecxa Mexico Office prepared a note in which a warning was given that the Central American economies were beginning to suffer rapid deterioration on account of factors of both external and internal origin, and that if nothing was done to deal with this situation it could imperil the level of economic interdependence reached through the integration programme.

In this article the author works out an interpretation of the present crisis which attempts to understand its deep-seated causes and therefore make it possible to influence its course successfully.

Hitherto Latin America’s adjustments to debt servicing requirements have taken the form of a contraction of imports and of the economy as a whole, which is producing perverse effects not only in the economic but also in the social and political spheres.

In this article the author discusses some important issues related to the use of energy in Latin American agricultural production.

One of the economic activities that has been most seriously affected by the current crisis of the Latin American economy is the production and exportation of commodities.

Central and peripheral capitalist countries alike are facing the present crisis without having discovered how to deal with the fundamental dilemmas of accumulation and distribution, which are clearly evidenced in the trend towards an imbalance between the growth rate of private and public expenditure and that of reproductive investment, and in the difficulty —especially acute in the periphery— of finding solutions for the problems of growth, employment, the external bottleneck and inflation.