Consumption in the new Latin American models

The main objective of this article is to study the role played by consumption in the economic and political strategies followed in recent years in tire countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America. The author places at the centre of his analysis an apparent paradox whose significance he seeks to discover: on the one hand, these societies display a considerable increase in the consumption of durable goods and other ‘sophisticated’ articles, primarily acquired through imports, and this is usually presented as a manifestation of the success of such strategies, but on the other hand, the same societies also display both growing inequality in the distribution of wealth and income and a deterioration in the degree of coverage of the basic needs of the poorest strata.