The State, decision-making and planning in Latin America

In the first half of the 1960s, a planning orientation began to develop in Latin Am erica which came into extensive use in a number of the countries in the region. The author contends that because of this orien tation’s utopian voluntarism, economistic reductionism and form alism, it was not really very useful for public policy management and its impact on actual decision-making in these countries was generally very lim ited. However, independently of these experiences to a great extent, national decision-making processes were developed in various countries of the region as a function of the political schemes supported by the dom inant social groups in these societies which can be regarded as genuine examples of capitalist planning.