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The political economy of development
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Import - Substitution
Editor:  Dr. Róbinson Rojas Sandford
Import substitution in high-tech industries: Prebisch lives in Asia!
By Alice H. Amsden - 2004
Prebisch "lives" in Asia because leading Asian governments still actively promote import substitution of high-tech parts and components. But they use promotional measures other than tariff protection to do so. Given performance standards, they have been highly successful. Now Latin America is behind Asian latecomers because it missed becoming a player in the information technology revolution. But Latin America can still learn from Asia rather than the Washington Consensus about how nationally owned enterprises can build mature high-tech industries in fields other than electronics.


Notes on Import-substitution strategies for development
By Róbinson Rojas - 1993
By and large, national strategies for development in less developed societies have been shaped by the international context, and the international context have been shaped by a few powerful economies during the XX century: Britain, Japan, United States, and Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy, France, and the Netherlands.
Writing in 1985, M. Bienfeld stated that "there is a greater need than ever for national policies to be formulated in the context of an informed judgement about the nature of international development, because these are currently deeply contradictory and increasingly uncertain." (M. Bienefeld and M. Godfrey (eds.), "The Struggle for Development. National Strategies in an international context", John Wiley & Sons Limited, 1985).


The Chilean way to socialism. Popular Unity
By Róbinson Rojas
By 1970, a large sector of the Chilean population was openly advocating a revolution. The prevailing revolutionary ideology was one based in the enormous economic power of the "mobilising state". This ideology posed the strategy of "making the revolution from inside the state", gaining the government, that is. That was the basis for the political programme presented by the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular) for the presidential elections in 1970.


R.Rojas: Notes on ECLAC's structuralism and dependency theory
R.Rojas: Dependent capitalist development: Chile(1960s)(notes)
R.Rojas: The Chinese attempt to build a socialist society (notes)
F.H.Cardoso: Dependency and Development in Latin America
ECLAC (CEPAL)
     Research and studies
     Basic texts
ECLA:The political context and the role of the State
ECLA:
Social Change in Latin America in the Early 1970s
Explorations of the patterns of growth and change in Latin America have long focused on the gap between what is really happening and what should be happening according to the values and theoretical preconceptions of the explorers.
They have generally concluded, for many different combinations of reasons, that the identifiable real trends are neither acceptable nor viable over the long term, but they have managed to find grounds for expecting major positive changes in those trends, whether by means of enlightened policies to be embarked on by the dominant forces in the societies or by means of a transformation of these forces emerging from the trends themselves.

World History Archives: Latin America
World History Archives: Africa
R.Rojas: Latin America: structural changes in the economy. 1950-70
F.H. Cardoso/E. Faletto: Capitalist development and the State
172 free market economies. GDP as % of total. 1960-65-70-75
   172 free market economies. GDP as % of total. 1980-85-90-92
A.Okolo: Dependency in Africa: stages of African political economy
T. Dos Santos: The Structure of Dependence
S.Allende: Speech to the UN General Assembly, 4th Dec. 1972
Asia in Crisis
Import substitution in Brazil between 1995 and 2000
By Renato Baumann and Ana Maria de Paiva Franco - 2006
The Brazilian economy suffered major changes in the second half of the 1990s, when price stabilization, trade liberalization with an overvalued exchange rate and privatizations altered productive processes in various sectors and led to import substitution, among other phenomena. Import substitution occurred in particular following the reform of the exchange-rate regime, which entailed a substantial devaluation in early 1999. This article seeks to measure the intensity of that process, distinguishing effects that can be related to exchange-rate variations induced by relative prices alone (spontaneous import substitution) from those that reflect levels of effective protection (import substitution induced by trade policy).