A Reappraisal of the Origins of Import-Substituting Industrialisation 1930-1950

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3357121
AutoresRosemary Thorp (autor de correspondencia)
Año1992
Volumen24
NúmeroS1
Páginas181-195
Fecha de publicación1992-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Latin American Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-216X • E-ISSN: 1469-767X
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0022216x0002383x
OpenAlexW2160592123
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas9

The current enthusiasm for trade liberalisation in Latin America, and indeed for a broad-ranging return to the market, has as its backdrop the widespread disillusion with the protectionist model of the 1950s and 1960s. Import substituting industrialisation (ISI) is seen as having used tariff barriers and controls to generate an extremely inefficient industry, suffering under a weight of state bureaucracy, with often inappropriate direct state participation. Its excessive import needs, for all its import-substituting origin, are directly related to the generation of the debt crisis.1The high and poorly-structured tariffs brought tariff-hopping foreign investment on inappropriate terms. Repressed domestic interest rates allowed such firms to borrow locally at negative real rates and crowd out locals who then borrowed abroad. This inefficiency, plus the overvalued exchange rates implicit in heavy protection, made exports of manufactures unthinkable, and thus condemned the incipient industry to severe limitations of market size as well as condemning the economies to growing balance of payments non-viability. This in turn severely affected industrial progress by limiting growth and exposing firms to stop-go policies.In turn, ISI policies themselves are seen as having originated with the turning point of the 1929 depression, when the export-led growth mechanism essentially broke down and at least the more sizeable Latin American economies turned fatally inwards. The trajectory from 1930 to the 'fully-fledged' ISI model of the 1950s and 1960s is typically left vague.This article will attempt to show that recent research now allows us a much fuller and more nuanced view of the evolution from the export economy model of the early century through to the later ISI model.2

Balance of payments · Convertibility · Currency · Current account · Economics · Exchange rate · Foreign direct investment · Great Depression · Industrialisation · International economics · International trade · Latin Americans · Liberalization · Liberian dollar · Macroeconomics · Market economy · Monetary economics · Political science · Protectionism · Tariff · Economic Theory and Policy · Global trade and economics