The region's changeover from a shortage of external funds to a relatively plentiful supply of such resources at a time when an effort is being made to liberalize its trade and financial sectors raises a number of questions regarding the effect of this phenomenon on the growth of Latin American exports. In an effort to answer these questions, the author examines a number of different attempts to arrive at a quantitative evaluation of the relationship between exchange and trade policies and the region's export performance in the 1980s. The main conclusions drawn from this analysis are …
Most studies of the region's economy say little or nothing about the status of its environment and natural resources; few references are made to the environmental quality of population centres or to fluctuations in natural resource stocks, especially of renewable resources, despite their crucial importance for the region's development options. The no more than moderate pace of the region's absorption of technical progress, the intensification of its international trade and the declining value of the region's products in the international marketplace have all brought increas…
The greater openness to the outside world exhibited today by rural, peasant and indigenous groups is particularly notable among the young people in those populations, whose behavioural patterns, referents and expectations differ from those of preceding generations. At the same time, living conditions in the farming sector have improved very little, and agricultural producers' self-images have worsened; both of these factors prompt young people to leave the sector. Today, only half the people born in rural areas in the 1960s still live there. Not enough attention has been devoted to this s…
The central focus of this article is on the role played by transnational corporations in the industrial realignment of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico between the end of the import substitution stage and the early 1990s. Based on recently published studies dealing with the sweeping changes occurring in Latin America's manufacturing sector following the region's economic crisis and liberalization process, a computer programme developed by the ECLAC Division of Production, Productivity and Management has been used to examine the changes that have taken place in the sector's pr…
Dedicated to Fernando Fajnzylber, In memoriam
This article analyses the approach which ECLAC has taken to the subject of technology. In this respect, the author identifies two different periods. The first starts with the inception of ECLAC and continues up to the 1970s. This period, during which efforts focused on achieving Latin America's industrialization, essentially by means of import substitution, was characterized by what the author terms technological passivity on the part of the relevant agents and of mainstream economic thought in the region. The second period, from t…
Foreword Four years ago, the secretariat submitted to the States members of ECLAC the document entitled Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity. It offered general guidelines for the development of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, including, in particular, the proposal that production should become more internationally competitive, not only in order to increase exports but also to achieve efficient import substitution. At the same time, the document offered a framework for subsequent activities of the Commission revolving around the study of a number of rel…
Presentación Hace ya cuatro años, la Secretaría entregó a los gobiernos de los Estados miembros de la CEPAL el documento titulado Transformación productiva con equidad. Este proponía orientaciones generales para el desarrollo de los países de América Latina y el Caribe, entre las que se destacaban aquellas orientadas a que la actividad productiva adquiriera competitividad internacional, tanto para aumentar las exportaciones como para lograr una eficiente sustitución de importaciones. Al mismo tiempo, ese documento ofrecía un marco de referencia para las actividades posteriores de la institució…
El enfoque de esta edición está
dirigido a la planificación a nivel de cuenca.
Ultimamente, en varios países de la región
se muestra un renacimiento de la
consideración de la cuenca como la unidad
más apropiada para la gestión del agua.
Justamente es a nivel de la cuenca donde
debe ser posible obtener una mejor
integración entre todos los interesados en la
gestión del agua tanto del sector público
como del privado, tanto los que se interesan
en el uso productivo del agua como los que
luchan por su conservación.…