The Latin American republics have accumulated between them, over more than a century and a half of independent political life, a wealth of experience of the relationship between states and markets. They offer examples which range from the extreme liberalism of the Murillo Toro regime in Colombia in the 1850s, which abstained from the organisation of its own military capacity, called upon its supporters to defend it if so inclined when it faced revolt, and duly fell from power, to the extreme interventionism of the pre-revolutionary regime in Cuba, which abolished the market in the dominant sugar sector, and the extreme utopianism of the Cuban revolution in its Guevarist phase, which attempted to abolish money in favour of moral incentives. With direct regard to the comparative theme to which this volume is addressed, Latin America since the Second World War has given birth to a distinctive development strategy, import-substituting industrialisation, and endowed it with a body of theory through the efforts of Raul Prebisch and other economists associated with the United Nations’ Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA).1 One of the consequences of the deep regional economic crisis in the 1980s has been the profound questioning of this model of state-led development. In Latin America at least, the turn to the market has been as much a result of internal developments as either an imposition from outside, or a response to prevailing fashions in official international development circles.
