The Latin American Experience with Development: Social Sciences, Economic Policies, and the Making of a Global Order, 1944-1971

Abstract

The dissertation traces the intellectual and policy endeavors of Latin American social scientists in their efforts to explain and bring about the region’s economic development. From the planning for the postwar economic order to the global expansion of the American multinational corporation and the end of the Bretton Woods era, these social scientists, whose nexus was the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA in English and CEPAL in Spanish and Portuguese), foreground development as the transformation of the region’s relation to the world economy. In an effort to reconcile national industrialization, regional cooperation, and global economic integration and through an institution that straddled regional and global spheres, Latin American economic experts, diplomats, and policymakers advised, formulated, and implemented economic policies and in the process developed new ideas about Latin America and the global economic order. The dissertation shows how they analyzed the region through the lens of measures such as international terms of trade, balance of payments, inflation, and foreign capital investment, all of which captured the region’s relation to the global economy. It explains how these policy experiments with the finance of development led to the production of concepts such as external vulnerability, center-periphery, structural disequilibria, and dependency. Therefore, the dissertation demonstrates that global approaches and concepts emerge from the peripheries, not the centers of power. Simultaneously, it shows that a notion of Latin America as a region emerges from global, not local, networks of policymaking and expertise. Overall, the dissertation demonstrates that in Latin America, development provided the intellectual and political space to rethink and remake Latin America and its place in the global economy, with enduring implications for the social scientific apparatus still in use today to understand the region’s historical trajectory.