CEPAL Review - Volume 1988, Issue 36, 1988

The topic of industrial restructuring and incorporation of technological progress is one with which both industrialized and developing countries are preoccupied, whether their economies are of the market or of the planned type.

An industrial revolution is taking place: its nucleus is the electronics complex, from which will emerge a new technological-economic paradigm and a new economic, social and cultural pattern which began to develop about 15 years ago and which will continue to unfold in the coming decades.

This article analyses the direct and indirect impact of new technologies on the Latin American economy, and in particular the way in which such technologies can become a factor capable of easing the present situation. Of particular interest is the contribution made by technical change to the increase in international competitiveness and to the necessary restructuring of national economies.

The objective of this work is to evaluate the results of the principal investigations conducted in recent years on the socio-economic implications of microelectronics-based automation in Brazil, and in particular the investigations carried out by the author himself.

The objective of this article is to analyse the economic behaviour of manufactured exports as one of the modalities assumed by the process of industrialization of Argentina during the period from 1973 to 1986. To that end, we analyse the export opening of industry; the presence of manufacturing in export flows; the modifications in sectoral composition; the changes in the real trajectory of foreign sales; and essentially the association between industrial development and manufactured exports.

This article discusses the changes observed during recent years in the social, demographic and occupational fields in the rural world, which, when they are added to the centuries-old problems of the sector, foreshadow severe imbalances in the context of the new modalities of functioning of Latin American economies that arise from the present crisis. It advances the thesis that in most of the countries of the region the solution of the problem of the peasantry and the achievement of a higher degree of equity in rural society, as well as between the rural and urban societies, constitute inescapable imperatives for any viable strategy of national development in the 1990s.

The countries of Latin America are confronting the challenge of dealing with a restructuring of their economies on the basis of adverse conditions resulting from the crisis. Neither the neoliberal State nor traditional interventionism can perform the exacting task that the crisis situation and the need for transformation demand. On the contrary, what is needed is a joining of forces by the social and productive sectors which proceeds from the assumption that competition is not only internal but also international.

In the decade of the 1980s, Cuba has confronted a worsening debt problem in terms of convertible currency and in the context of its participation in the world economy. Before 1985, the debt problem appeared to be manageable, indeed it did not seem to be seriously damaging to Cuba’s macroeconomic growth performance, which was strong from 1981 to 1985 in contrast to most other developing country debtors, which underwent profound economic contraction in this period.

The world food market has lost the noteworthy stability that characterized it in the 1930s and 1960s. The “shortage crisis” of the 1972-1974 period was followed by an “oversupply crisis”, with strongly destabilizing effects on international prices. The first crisis aroused an intense interest in seeking formulas to cover the gap between effective domestic demand and domestic supply, so as to stabilize consumption. The transition to a market of abundant supply with failing prices relegated to second position the subject of food security, understood in traditional terms, and shifted priority to measures aimed at tackling the persistence of under-consumption and malnutrition in vast sectors of the population, even in countries with a sufficient aggregate supply.

Analyses of the regional economy are highly influenced by what happens in the large- and medium-sized countries of Latin America. However, there is a category of countries whose particular features have not received due attention nor interpretation.

The process of import substitution that got underway in Latin America in the train of the Great Depression was principally a spontaneous response to the radical deterioration of the international prices of primary products, to the breakdown of the multilateral international trading system (and the collapse of world trade) and to the abrupt reversal of resource transfers.