2 - The Latin American economies, 1929–1939

Summary

Economic performance and policy in the 1930s in Latin America has generated a substantial literature as a result of two factors in particular. First, the view put forward after 1950 by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America [and the Caribbean] (ECLA[C]), that the 1930s marked a crucial turning point in the transition from export-led growth to import-substituting industrialization (ISI) (see ECLA, Economic Survey of Latin America, 1949 [New York, 1951]) led to a wave of investigations to test this particular hypothesis. Secondly, the debt crisis in the 1980s inevitably invited comparisons with the debt crisis in the 1930s, with scholars searching for similarities and differences in Latin American responses to the two shocks.

In view of the magnitude of the external shock applied to Latin America at the beginning of the 1930s, it is appropriate in a bibliographical essay to begin by referring to the literature on the international economy between the two world wars. A most important source is Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression (Berkeley and London, 1986), which is a revised version of a classic book first published in 1973 and expanded with greater reference to the Latin American experience. There are a number of excellent surveys on world performance and policy, including Arthur Lewis, Economic Survey, 1919–39 (London, 1949) and H. W. Arndt, The Economic Lessons of the 1930s (London, 1944). Long-run trends in world trade, including the 1930s, are analysed in Alfred Maizels, Industrial Growth and World Trade (Cambridge, Eng., 1963) and P. Lamartine Yates, Forty Years of Foreign Trade (London, 1959).