The rise and decline of economic structuralism in Latin America: New dimensions

Latin American Research Review

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 100-125

  Love , Joseph L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 27744521212     PISSN: 00238791     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lar.2005.0058     Document Type: Review

References (133)

1. Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe.
2. I exclude structuralism's thesis on inflation and its fundamental contribution to dependency analysis - matters on which I have already had something to say. See Love, "Economic Ideas and Ideologies in Latin America since 1930," in Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 6, part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 393-460;
3. and Love, "The Origins of Dependency Analysis," Journal of Latin American Studies 22, no. 1 (Feb. 1990): 143-68.
4. Latin American structuralism is one of a family of structuralisms. These approaches were eclectic, but generally grew out of the German Historical School of economics and were widely employed in continental Europe until fairly recently.
5. The first edition of the work listed CEPAL as the author, but it was reprinted in 1962 under Prebisch's own name (Lake Success, N.Y.: 1950 [Spanish original, 1949]).
6. While Singer saw contrasting elasticities of demand for agricultural and industrial goods in the world markets as responsible for declining terms of trade, Prebisch viewed the root of the problem as that of factor markets - labor and capital.
7. The term was already employed to describe the school in 1971, however, by Stanley J. Stein and Shane J. Hunt in "Principal Currents in the Economic Historiography of Latin America," Journal of Economic History 31 (March 1971): 237. The notion of "structuralism" was probably an extension of the thesis of structurally-induced inflation, developed in the 1950s by Juan Noyola, Aníbal Pinto, and Osvaldo Sunkel.
8. Aníbal Pinto was principally responsible for this innovation. See Pinto and Armando Di Filippo, "Desarrollo y pobreza en América Latina: un enfoque histórico-estructural," América Latina: Una visión estructuralista, ed. Pinto, Colección América Latina (México, D.F.: Facultad de Economía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1991), 555-76;
9. and Ricardo Bielschowsky, "Cincuenta años del pensamiento de la CEPAL: Una reseña," in Cincuenta Años de Pensamiento en la CEPAL. Textos Seleccionados, ed. CEPAL, vol. 1 (Santiago: CEPAL, 1998), 35.
10. José Antonio Ocampo and María Angela Parra, "Returning to an Eternal Debate: The Terms of Trade for Commodities in the Twentieth Century" (Informes y Estudios Especiales Series, no. 5, CEPAL, Feb., 2003) http://www.eclac.cl/publicaciones/ SecretariaEjecutiva/3/LCL1813PI/lcl1813i.pdf (accessed April 2005).
11. Diakossavas and Scandizzo concluded that there was a tendency toward deterioration of (net barter) terms of trade, but that the tendency was small, "in most cases reversing itself given a sufficiently long time horizon" (p. 250). An earlier study by Grilli and Yang, considered a classic, supported the deterioration thesis for the period they studied (1900-1986). León and Soto, examining the data for Latin American nations only, argue that there was no long-term tendency toward deterioration for most countries. See Dimitris Diakossavas and Pasquale L. Scandizzo, "Trends in the Terms of Trade of Primary Commodities, 1900-1982: The Controversy and its Origins," Economic Development and Cultural Change 39, no. 2 (Jan. 1991): 231-64;
12. Enzo R. Grilli and Maw Cheng Yang, "Primary Commodity Prices, Manufactured Goods Prices, and the Terms of Trade of Developing Countries: What the Long Run Shows," World Bank Economic Review 2, no. 1 (Jan. 1988): 1-47;
13. and Javier León and Raimundo Soto, "Términos de intercambio en la América Latina: Una cuantificación de la hipótesis Prebisch-Singer," El Trimestre Económico 62, no. 2 (April-June, 1995): 171-99. These studies, like that of Ocampo and Parra, focus on net barter terms of trade, as opposed to income terms of trade and factoral terms of trade, for which literatures also exist.
14. "Quel développement pour une société solidaire et économe? Eléments pour le débat," http:// www.france.attac.org/a2629 (accessed April 15, 2004). ATTAC stands for Association pour une taxe sur les transactions pour l'aide aux citoyens.
15. Advocates of ISI tended to ignore the consequences of the fact that such substitution turned the domestic terms of trade against export agriculture.
16. Valpy FitzGerald, "La CEPAL y la teoría de la industrialización," Revista de la CEPAL, número extraordinario (October 1998): 17, http://www.cepal.org/publicaciones/ secretariaejecutiva/7/lcg2037pe/valpy.htm (accessed April 2005).
17. Each phase was characterized by different elasticities of demand.
18. FitzGerald, "CEPAL y la teoría," 3.
19. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, "Economic Performance and the State in Latin America," Liberalization and its Consequences: A Comparative Perspective on Latin America and Eastern Europe, ed. Werner Baer and Joseph L. Love (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2000), 27.
20. Henry Bruton, "Import substitution," in Handbook of Development Economics, vol. 2, ed. Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (Armsterdam: North Holland, 1989), 1601-43.
21. For an application of the notion of technical learning through ISI in Latin America, see the CEPAL-sponsored studies by Jorge Katz and Bernardo Kosacoff, "Aprendizaje tecnológico, desarrollo institucional y la microeconomía de la sustitución de importaciones," Desarrollo Económico (Jan., 1998).
22. "Surprisingly, in retrospect, the ISI industrialization received its initial theoretical boost from the early revisionist trade theorists ... Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer." Ozay Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 80.
23. Fitzgerald, to the contrary, holds that a major negative effect of ISI was the loss of control of the fiscal deficit, owing to populist pressures for employment, contracts, and welfare. This problem resulted in periods of rapid inflation, followed by abrupt stabilization policies that depressed private investment. Fitzgerald, "CEPAL y la teoría," 10, 17.
24. "Macro mess" is the term that Enrique Cárdenas, José Antonio Ocampo, and Rosemary Thorp apply to Latin America in general for the 1980s. See their "Introduction," to Cárdenas, Ocampo, and Thorp, eds., An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Latin America, vol. 3, Industrialization and the State in Latin America: The Postwar Years (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 28.
25. Dani Rodrik, "Understanding Economic Policy Reform," Journal of Economic Literature 34 (March 1996), 11, 27 (quotation).
26. Ian M. D. Little, Tibor Scitovsky, and Maurice Scott, Industry and Trade in Some Developing Countries: A Comparative Study (London: Oxford U. Press, 1970);
27. Rodrik, "Understanding Economic Policy Reform," 16 (citing Díaz Alejandro; the quotation is from Rodrik).
28. For more on the cumulative negative effects of import substitution, see Alan M. Taylor, "On the Costs of Inward-Looking Development: Price Distortions, Growth, and Divergence in Latin America," Journal of Economic History, 5, no. 1 (March 1998): 1-28.
29. Cárdenas, Ocampo, and Thorp, Economic History of Latin America, 24-26.
30. John Williamson, The Progress of Policy Reform in Latin America, Policy Analyses in International Economics 28 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990);
31. Cárdenas, Ocampo, and Thorp, Economic History of Latin America, 31.
32. As for the International Monetary Fund, it had a marginal role in policy on trade and industry, but like the World Bank, it occasionally favored expedient intervention, despite its pro-liberalization ideology. See Richard Webb, "The Influence of International Financial Institutions on ISI" in Cárdenas, Ocampo, and Thorp, 103-5, 110-12.
33. Raúl Prebisch, Hacia una dinámica del desarrollo latinoamericano (1963; repr., Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1967]), 21, 41, 90, 99.
34. See also Santiago Macario's blistering critique of the way ISI had been pursued in Latin America, published by CEPAL the following year: "Protectionism and Industrialization in Latin America," Economic Bulletin for Latin America 9 (1964): 61-101.
35. Aníbal Pinto, "Notas sobre industrialización y progreso técnico en la perspectiva Prebisch-CEPAL" in América Latina: Una visión estructuralista, 635-60.
36. For a theoretical reconsideration of structuralism and its theorization of import substitution, showing that CEPAL anticipated most of its critics, see FitzGerald, "La CEPAL y la teoría."
37. With the exception of the United States in the immediate post-Civil War era. John H. Coatsworth and Jeffrey G. Williamson, "Always Protectionist? Latin American Tariffs from Independence to Great Depression," Journal of Latin American Studies (May 2004): 205-32.
38. Pablo Astorga, Ame R. Bergés, and Valpy FitzGerald, "The Standard of living in Latin America during the Twentieth Century" (working paper, QEH [Queen Elizabeth House] Working Paper Series - QEHWPS103, Latin American Centre, St. Anthony's College, Oxford, 2003) http://www2.qeh.ox.ac.uk/pdf/qehwp/qehwps103.pdf (accessed April 2005). The study covers the whole of the century for the six economically largest countries - Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela - and 1950-2000 for the other thirteen, owing to insufficient data on this group for the pre-1950 years.
39. The rate of growth in 1900-1939 was 1.3 percent a year with a standard deviation (a measure of volatility) of 3.5; for 1940-1980, growth was 2.7 percent, and volatility 2.0; and for 1980-2000, growth was only 0.6 percent, and volatility was 2.4. Ibid., 6.
40. Ralf Hussmanns, "Developments in the Design and Implementation of Informal Sector and Similar Surveys - A Review of National Practices and Experiences." Doc. ICLS/16/RD2 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1998).
41. Víctor E. Tokman, "The Informal Sector in Latin America: From Underground to Legality," Beyond Regulation: The Informal Economy in Latin America, ed. Tokman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 4. (The term "informal sector" was first used in an ILO study in Kenya in 1972.)
42. Rosemary Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, 1998), 221. This figure includes the rural sector as well.
43. Pinto and Di Filippo, "Desarrollo y pobreza," 555-76.
44. Hector Assael, interview with author, Santiago, July 15, 1998.
45. CEPAL, Séptimo périodo de sesiones, Documento de Sala de Conferencias no. 2, Estudio sobre la mano de obra en América Latina (La Paz, Bolivia: CEPAL 1957), Mimeo. 221, 365.
46. Zygmunt Slawinski, La economía paralela (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Común, 1972), x.
47. In Spanish, Programa Regional de Empleo de América Latina y del Caribe.
48. In Spanish, Instituto Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Planificación Económica y Social.
49. Gerard Thirion, "The Birth of PREALC (1968-1973)," in [Anon.], PREALC: 25 Years (Santiago: ILO, n.d.), 18.
50. Ibid., 39.
51. Tokman, "The maturity of PREALC (1973-1993)," in PREALC: 25 Years, 38.
52. Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism (New York: Harper and Row, 1989; Sp. Ed., 1986).
53. Tokman, "The Informal Sector in Latin America: From Underground to Legality," in Beyond Regulation: The Informal Economy in Latin America, ed. Tokman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 4.
54. Ibid., 5, 10, 18, 20.
55. Tokman, "Introducción: Dos décadas de sector informal en América Latina," in El sector informal en América Latina: Dos décadas de análisis, ed. Tokman (México, D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1991), 15.
56. In a Marxist approach to informality, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and other scholars at the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP) in São. Paulo had made a similar argument in the early 1970s. See a summary in Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U. Press, 1996), 210-11.
57. Celso Furtado, Formação econômica do Brasil (Rio: Fundo de Cultura, 1959);
58. Aníbal Pinto Santa Cruz, Chile, un caso de desarrollo frustrado (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1959);
59. Aldo Ferrer, La economía argentina: las etapas de su desarrollo y problemas actuales (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1963);
60. Osvaldo Sunkel and Pedro Paz, El subdesarrollo latinoamericano y la teoría del desarrollo (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España, 1970). The last-named work, which is only partly devoted to the history of the region, is strongly influenced by dependency analysis, which at the time of publication was at its apogee. (Note that Furtado's Economic Development of Latin America: Historical Background and Contemporary Problems [1970] is less satisfying as a historical study than The Economic Growth of Brazil, because of the former's much greater focus on current issues.)
61. Later, a more specialized structuralist work appeared on Mexico: René Villareal, El desequilibrio externo en la industrialización de México (1929-75): Un enfoque estructuralista (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976). See below.
62. Furtado's pre-CEPAL dissertation does not contain much formal economic analysis of any kind. See Furtado, "L'économie coloniale brésilienne (XVIe et XVIIe siècles): Eléments d'Histoire Economique Appliqués" (PhD thesis, Faculté de Droit, U. de Paris, 1948);
63. but A economia brasileira (Rio: A Noite, 1954)
64. and Uma economia dependente (Rio: MEC) offer a structuralist analysis of Brazil's economic history
65. Formação econômica do Brasil was published in English as (The Economic Growth of Brazil) (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press). The English title is slightly misleading, since formação indicates qualitative aspects of development as well as quantitative growth
66. Werner Baer, "Furtado Revisted," Luso-Brazilian Review 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1974), 115.
67. Furtado, Economic Growth, 69-71;
68. Ricardo Bielschowsky, "Brazilian Economic Thought in the Ideological Cycle of Developmentalism" (PhD diss., Leicester University, 1985), 243.
69. On "involution" see Furtado, Economic Growth, 71.
70. Furtado, Economic Growth, 107-8.
71. Bielschowsky, "Brazilian Economic Thought," 241.
72. Furtado, Economic Growth, 167.
73. Baer, "Furtado Revisted," 119.
74. Furtado, Economic Growth, 205-6.
75. Ibid., 211.
76. Ibid., 218-19.
77. For a review of the debate, see Wilson Suzigan, Indústria brasileira: Origem e desenvolvimento (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), 21-73.
78. For case studies of Latin American countries, including Brazil, see essays in Rosemary Thorp, ed., Latin America in the 1930s: The Role of the Periphery in World Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1984).
79. For the best overview of the Depression across Latin America, see Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapter 7. Bulmer-Thomas concurs with previous revisionists and finds that import-substitution industrialization was significantly dependent on export recovery, except in Argentina (222-24).
80. On the positive association of trade and growth in the postwar era, see Ross Levine and David Renelt, "A Sensitivity Analysis of Cross-Country Growth Regressions," American Economic Review 82, no. 4 (Sept.,1992), 942-63, examining data for 119 countries;
81. and Hadi Salehi Esfahani, "Exports, Imports and Economic Growth in Semi-Industrialized Countries," Journal of Development Economics 35 (1991), 93-116, considering data for 31 semi-industrialized countries. Esfahani emphasizes that the correlation between export and GDP performance has mainly to do with exports' foreign exchange earnings; they mitigate import "shortages," which restrict the growth of output in these countries. But Clemens and Williamson have suggested economic growth and openness before 1950 were not positively correlated.
82. See note 94.
83. During World War II, Brazil's growth was perhaps less hampered because of the existence of a small capital goods sector.
84. Roberto Borges Martins, "A Historiografia sobre o Século XIX em Minas Gerais: Notas para um debate" (Paper presented at Seminário sobre a História de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, June 2004).
85. On the dynamism of the non-export economy of nineteenth-century Minas, see Amílcar Martins Filho and Roberto B. Martins, "Slavery in a Nonexport Economy: Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais Revisited," Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 3 (1983): 537-68.
86. See the criticism in Stein and Hunt, "Principal Currents," 243-47, focusing on vagueness and incompleteness in Pinto's and Ferrer's arguments.
87. José Gabriel Palma, "Growth and Structure of Chilean Manufacturing Industry from 1830 to 1935: Origins and Development of a Process of Industrialization in an Export Economy" (Ph.D. thesis, Oxford U., 1979), 344-45.
88. Villarreal, Industrialización, deuda y desequilibrio externo en México: Un enfoque neoestructuralista (1929-1988), 2d ed. (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988).
89. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History of Latin America, 308.
90. Furtado, A Fantasia organizada (Rio: Paz e Terra, 1985), 120-22;
91. Mateo Magariños, Diálogos con Raúl Prebisch (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991), 140.
92. Furtado, Fantasia organizada, 106. See following notes for other documentation.
93. [Confederação Nacional das Indústrias], "Interpretação do processo de desenvolvimento econômico da América Latina," Estudos Econômicos 1, nos. 3-4 (Sept.-Dec. 1950), 271-306;
94. Kathryn A. Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 155;
95. Sikkink, "Developmentalism and Democracy: Ideas, Institutions, and Economic Policy Making in Brazil and Argentina (1955-1962)" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1988), 406.
96. See Desenvolvimento e Conjuntura 1, no. 1 (July 1957): 5-15 (including CEPAL's deteriorating terms-of-trade argument, the structuralist thesis that inflation is partly caused by bottlenecks in production, and the need for government planning or programming). Later numbers in the period examined (through 1960) were generally favorable to CEPAL.
97. Sikkink, Ideas, 154-57.
98. Juscelino Kubitschek, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional: 1956. (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1956), 47-48, 54, 275, 278, 362.
99. Furtado, Economic Development of Latin America, 208;
100. Bielschowsky, "Brazilian Economic Thought," 182.
101. For a survey of CEPAL's influence in the Brazil of the fifties, see Jacqueline A. H. Haffner, A CEPAL e a industrializaçãao brasileira (1950-1961) (Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2002).
102. ILPES, "Programa de Capacitación 1963 [through 1969]." Mimeo, ILPES Archive, CEPAL.
103. Compiled from ILPES Archive, CEPAL, Santiago.
104. Veronica Montecinos, "Economists in Political and Policy Elites in Latin America," in The Post-1945 Internationalization of Economics, ed. A. W. Coats (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 296.
105. In Portuguese, the plan's name was Plano Mineiro de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social. Marshall C. Eakin, Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 155.
106. Instituto Latinoamericano y del Caribe de Planificación Económica y Social. "XXXI Curso Internacional: Desarrollo, Planificación y Políticas Públicas. Santiago, 25 de junio al 7 de diciembre de 1990," typescript at ILPES, Santiago.
107. Cárdenas, Ocampo, and Thorp, Economic History of Latin America, 12 (referring to CEPAL as a whole).
108. http://www.eclac.cl/ilpes/
109. Love, "Structuralism in Peripheral Europe: Latin American Ideas in Spain and Portugal," Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (June, 2004): 114-40;
110. Love, "Flux şi Reflux: Teoriile Structuraliste ale Dezvoltǎrii din Perioada Interbelicǎ şi Cea Postbelicǎ în România şi America Latinǎ," Oeconomica, 11, no. 3 (2002): 269-83.
111. CEPAL first took note of the problem in Argentina as early as 1956. See CEPAL, "Preliminary Study of the Effects of Postwar Industrialisation on Import Structures and External Vulnerability in Latin America," in Economic Survey of Latin America 1956 (New York: United Nations, 1957), 128, 150, 151.
112. That Raúl Prebisch was the originator of this movement is asserted in a standard textbook on development theory and in a history of that subject. See the text of Michael P. Todaro, Economic Development in the Third World, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 1985), 560;
113. and Heinz W. Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 141.
114. For example, UNCTAD's Integrated Commodity Fund, whose purpose was to stabilize the earnings of commodity exports, was stillborn: It failed to get the united backing of the primary producers themselves, quite apart from not obtaining the support of the wealthy nations. Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World 112.
115. Paul Krugman, "Toward a Counter-Counter Revolution in Development Theory," offset, World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics: 1992 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1992), 33.
116. A more widely-available version of his argument is found in Krugman, Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), chapter 1. Krugman holds out the possibility that the theoretical problem can be solved.
117. On these matters see Jacques J. Polak, The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: A Changing Relationship (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1994), 7, 12-13.
118. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
119. Williamson, "What Washington Means by Policy Reform," in The Progress of Policy Reform, 9-33.
120. On Chile's GDP per capita in the 1990s, see Penn World Tables, http:// datacentre2.chass.utoronto.ca/ (accessed April 2005);
121. on income distribution, see CEPAL, Una década de desarrollo social en América Latina: 1990-1999 (Santiago: CEPAL, 2004), 95.
122. William Easterly, "The Lost Decades: Developing Countries' Stagnation in Spite of Policy Reform 1980-1998," Journal of Economic Growth 6 (June, 2001): 135-57 (quotation, p. 137).
123. World Bank, 2004 World Development Indicators (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2004), 200-5.
124. They cite Clemens and Williamson, who examine the relationship between economic growth and measures of outward orientation. See Michael Clemens and Jeffery Williamson, "Why the Tariff-Growth Correlation Changed after 1950," (Working Paper 8459, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
125. David L. Lindauer and Lant Pritchett, "What's the Big Idea? The Third Generation of Policies for Economic Growth," Economia (2002): 21.
126. Using a medical analogy, they argue for a "diagnostic tree" that will allow practitioners to examine symptoms that reflect treatable conditions. The tree would have at least five elements: "current level of income, current status of growth, linkages with the world economy, government strength, and government capacity" (Ibid., 26).
127. Income distribution is, of course, a variable over which governments can exercise some control.
128. Hilary Burger, "An Intellectual History of the ECLA Culture, 1948-1964" (PhD diss., Harvard University., 1998), 32, citing Victor Urquidi.
129. On equity as a continuous CEPAL theme beginning in the 1960s, see author's interview with Osvaldo Sunkel, Santiago, July 23, 1998;
130. and interview with José Antonio Ocampo, Santiago, July 6, 1998.
131. Fernando Fajnzylber, "La CEPAL y el neoliberalismo, coincidencias y discrepancias" [interview], Industria y Desarrollo 3, no. 10 (1991): 17-21.
132. See [UN] Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Changing Production Patterns with Social Equity: The Prime Task of Latin American and Caribbean Development in the 1990s (Santiago, Chile: United Nations and CEPAL, 1990);
133. and the report a decade later by CEPAL's Executive Secretary, José Antonio Ocampo: Equidad, desarrollo y ciudadanía (Santiago: CEPAL, 2000).