No comprehensive history of economic thought in Latin America exists, despite its long-term, weighty sway over the region's domestic and international affairs.
This chapter focuses on Spanishspeaking South America as a region whose economic and geopolitical history is distinct from that of Mexico and Central America and dissimilar from that of Brazil.
References to the larger Latin American region, however, are unavoidable. Latin American professional economists, as well as their predecessors since colonial times, have often spoken with an idiosyncratic and somewhat contentious voice, being at once, integral and peripheral to evolving notions of the modernizing West. Thinkers from the region have never been too isolated from their counterparts in Europe and the United States but never fully absorbed by external influences either.At different times, a uniquely politicized internationalism appears as the hallmark of Latin America's economic thinking, hardly distinguishable from overall conceptions of power hierarchies. Relative to other areas of the world, economic ideas in Latin America seemed more intentionally sharpened into political tools, overtly framed in struggles over regional identity and autonomy. Two hundred years after independence, the essence of colonial controversies over economic relations with the outside world still informs strategies to deal with the region's subordinate position in global systems of domination. Very high levels of class, ethnic, and other forms of inequality introduce another layer of politicization to Latin America's economic thinking. Distributive questions can rapidly transform the most technical controversies into ideological confrontations. Strategic conflicts over the pace and timing of economic policy reforms have more than once altered the course of democracy. Indeed, economic issues have torn the heart of Latin American politics more than language, religion, or any other social cleavage.
In transnational economic debates, only a few major figures from Latin America have received a hearing commensurate with their merit.
In country after country one finds examples of originality and cosmopolitanism but a world map of economic thought would come out in chiaroscuro, with the Anglo-American zone in starkest relief. By and large, economic knowledge produced in Latin America and in other non-English-speaking areas remains unnoticed, particularly when articulated in a language that is less theoretical and more eclectic than usage within the world's most prestigious academic centers. Comparative studies in the history of economic ideas have never been enthusiastically cultivated, although intercontinental comparisons that include Latin America can be found in the works of Love (1996) and Coats (1997). As the hegemonic canon of economics spread since the mid-twentieth century, those studies were further devalued.Recent generations of Latin American economists, more attuned to universalist claims in professional and disciplinary norms, came to lose sight of what their more regionalist and nationalist forbearers had sought to accomplish by challenging the ideas and interests of world powers, in some cases with innovative flare and fame. The younger elites of the profession in this region, typically trained abroad, aspire to prestige and employment in the worldwide market for economic expertise by publishing and participating as full constituents of mainstream economics. The career trajectories of current economic ministers and central bankers as well as the most distinguished academic economists illustrate this convergence trend, with notable variations across and within countries (Montecinos and Markoff, 2009).
While policy regimes have oscillated from market dominance to state dominance and back, a recurrently debated theme is whether imported economic doctrines are biased in favor of external interests and whether those doctrines adequately account for the contextual and historical specificities of what has been called Latin American peripheral capitalism (Prebisch, 1981). In simplified formulation, two opposing views condense major disputes: an orthodox camp in favor of free markets that recognizes a unified body of economic ideas, and a heterodox camp that supports state intervention, disciplinary pluralism and distinctively Latin American economic interpretations. In reality, a more complex pattern of orthodoxies and heterodoxies have coexisted at various times (Ocampo, n.d.).