Latin America on the threshold of the 1980s

With the end of the 1970s at hand, by way of drawing up a general balance the author sketches the main features of Latin American development in the recent past and notes the main challenges which the region will have to face in the years to come. He begins by recognizing that since the war, and especially during the 1960s and the beginning of the present decade, Latin America achieved vigorous economic growth, but he stresses that this did not succeed in solving some of the most serious social problems, while it also brought with it a growing internationalization of the economies of the region, with a consequent increase in their external vulnerability. Furthermore, towards the middle of the 1970s there was a reversal of the expansive cycle as a result of the flagging performance of the central economies, the changes in the international prices of some goods, especially oil, and the internal difficulties faced by the national development patterns themselves.