3 - The Latin American economies, 1939–c. 1950

Summary

Very little literature on the economic development of Latin America specifically addresses the 1940s. Analyses tend to see the 1929 Depression as initiating the shift to import-substituting industrialization in the form that is recognizable by the 1950s, and give little attention to the precise problematic of the Second World War and its aftermath. The wealth of studies of the 1930s therefore simply finds no parallel in the next decade. The international economy is, however, more fully studied, since this was a period of strong institutional innovation. See, for example, S. W. Black, A Levite among the Priests: Edward M. Bernstein and the Origins of the Bretton Woods System (Oxford, 1991). Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950 (New York, 1985) is an important study of the immediate postwar period, especially, for our purposes, chapter 9: ‘Natural resources and national security: U.S. policy in the developing world, 1945–50’. K. Kock, International Trade Policy and the GATT, 1947–1967 (Stockholm, 1969), is a useful source on GATT and the role of the United States. Longer-run general studies of the international economy that incorporate this period include: Alfred Maizels, Industrial Growth and World Trade: An Empirical Study of Trends in Production, Consumption and Trade in Manufactures, 1899–1959(Cambridge, Eng., 1963) and P. Lamartine Yates, Forty Years of Foreign Trade: A Statistical Handbook with Special Reference to Primary Products and Underdeveloped Countries (London, 1959). Two works on foreign investment which cover a longer span of Latin American economic history but which are useful for this period are Barbara Stallings, Bankers to the Third World: U.S. Portfolio Investment in Latin America, 1900–1986 (Berkeley, 1987) and J. Fred Rippy, British Investments in Latin America, 1822–1949 (Minneapolis, Minn., 1959).