Governance, competitiveness and social integration

This article seeks to set forth the grounds for an approach integrating political governance, economic competitiveness and social integration as interdependent variables. To this end, it looks at the possibilities for Latin American society to simultaneously increase its capacity for democratic self-government, improve its economic competitiveness and tackle the main problems of social exclusion and poverty, since if this is not done the region will find it more difficult to take its place in the concert of modem democratic nations. In order to analyse the evolution of those variables from a systemic standpoint, each of them is first of all reviewed separately and then an attempt is made to construct an interactive scheme for their mutual relations, bearing in mind the economic and cultural conditions for productivity growth and the need for a social and political matrix which will give a sense of direction to the overall set of variables.