Suchergebnisse

Discusses neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America, neopopulism in Colombia and Peru, and populism in Venezuela; 4 articles.

We summarize the history of Latin American urbanization with a focus on the evolution of cities from the colonial and post-colonial eras to the adoption of the import-substitution model of development and its subsequent replacement by a neoliberal adjustment model. Consequences for the urban system of both import-substitution and neoliberal policies are examined, with a focus on the evolution of the urban population and trends in several strategic areas. We examine indicators of unemployment and informal employment; poverty and inequality; and urban crime and victimization rates as they evolved from the import-substitution era to the implosion of the neoliberal model that replaced it in the early twenty-first century. The consequences for cities of the disastrous application of this model are summarized as a prelude to the analysis of more recent trends. Based on the latest statistical indicators available, we document a significant decline in unemployment and economic inequality in six Latin American nations that jointly comprise 80 percent of the population of the region. Employment in the informal sector also declined steadily, although it still comprises a large proportion of Latin American labor markets. Consequences of this situation for the citizenry and alternative government policies to address it are discussed.

The initial interest in womens studies arose in the sixties from a desire to rectify the fact that women, whether as actors or subjects, had been ignored in the evolution of knowledge. It soon became clear, however, that this had been more than a fault of omission for, because of lack of information, women had often been misunderstood and misrepresented. Several modernisation studies, for example, have concentrated on interviewing men and yet produced generalisations about levels of modernisation for the population as a whole. Joseph Kahi in TheMeasurement of Modernismmade numerous statements about modernisation in Brazil and Mexico and its relationship to institutions in society, but his 1,300 interviews were all with men.1The few studies which do include women show that they lag behind men in educational achievement and social mobility.2This suggests that had Kahi included women in his samples his results might have been rather different.

Latin American neostructuralism emerged within the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean by 1990. As such, it was aimed at reviewing original Latin American structuralism and updating those contributions to the new phase of global capitalism. Notwithstanding this institutional point of view, this article argues that neostructuralism did not represent an update to Latin American structuralism but rather a differentiation from its critical and original contributions, which relies mainly on the displacement of the center-periphery concept. In the framework of the neoliberal offensive, this change toward capitalism was the result of the greater influence of theories and approaches generated in the center to problematize Latin America's development, as well as of the requirement to depoliticize the discussion of development. JEL Classification: B2, B5, O1

The essays in this collection examine agrarian transformation in Latin America and the role in this of peasants, with particular reference to Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Central America.