Three Contending Theories Predicting Patterns of Economic Development in Latin American Countries: An Empirical Evaluation
Abstract
Economic development has been a subject that has attracted considerable attention in the last several decades. With the burgeoning Third World debt crisis, the growing emphasis on an integrated world economy, and the increasing multi-polarity of the international system, economic development seems all the more crucial. A wealth of literature exists which investigates the mechanics of how and why economic development takes place. Some authors use a general approach to explain why certain countries are more developed than others. Other authors focus on the nuts and bolts of the economic mechanisms that operate during development. Still others use patterns of economic development as an independent variable to explain a variety of political and economic phenomena.
None of these writings, however, explain what factors actually lead a country to choose a particular pattern of development. This lack of concern with patterns of economic development as a dependent variable has led to a serious gap in our understanding of the development process. In other words, the usefulness of knowledge about the general effects of a particular set of development policies is restricted by our lack of understanding as to why that particular set of policies was implemented rather than another. To my knowledge, there has been no satisfactory attempt to fill this gap in the development literature.
This project is an attempt to fill that gap in the development literature. This chapter provides background information which reviews some of the relevent literature and then outlines my research methodology. Chapters two through five relate research results country by country, and chapter six draws general conclusions from the four specific country cases. Included at the end is an extensive bibliography that contains not only works specifically cited in this paper, but also works that contributed significantly to development areas which are closely related to my study and that have been invaluable in providing the necessary background knowledge to tackle a project such as this.
Description
Program year: 1989/1990Digitized from print original stored in HDR
Subject
Economic developmentpatterns of economic development
Latin America
political pressures
policy implementation
Citation
Keating, Kevin P. (1990). Three Contending Theories Predicting Patterns of Economic Development in Latin American Countries: An Empirical Evaluation. University Undergraduate Fellow. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /CAPSTONE -BishopR _1979.