Crafting The Third World

This innovative study compares the history of economic ideas and ideologies in Romania and Brazil - and more broadly, those in East Central Europe and Latin America - in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas previous histories of the idea of economic development have focused on 'First World' theorists, this book considers theorists in two 'backward' countries who made important contributions to the field. Latin America is well known to economic historians as the region that gave rise to the Structuralist school and Dependency movement. Less well known is the fact that East Central Europe is important as the early training ground and the empirical concern of the first generation of development economists. This comparative study examines the ways in which economists and other social scientists in Romania and Brazil confronted the issues of economic backwardness.

"A transnational history of corporatism-a "third path" between capitalism and communism-centered on mid-twentieth century Brazil. Following the First World War, there was a widespread feeling that the unchecked free-market competition had given rise to financial crisis, social unrest, and chronic underdevelopment. With people and governments across the world looking for an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism, Brazil took a central role in experimenting with a "third path" between capitalism and communism: corporatism. Remaking Capitalism: A Global History of Corporatism in Brazil, 1920s-1960s argues that corporatism transformed the Brazilian state into an agent of economic development, and it explains why it matters that this transformation was engineered under an authoritarian regime. Melissa Teixeira incorporates wide-ranging legal, economic, and cultural sources to document the process of state-building from the perspective of government ministries and grocery markets alike from 1917 to the 1950s. During the Getulio Vargas regime (1930-45), especially, the state took an unprecedented role in controlling social pressures and economic growth via wage and price agencies, labor tribunals and technical councils. Teixeira looks beyond categorical authoritarianism to explain how corporatism constituted an early experiment with the mixed economy as a path to development, combining state planning with a market economy. Corporatism, she shows, generated a model of development dependent on uneven and unequal citizenship, in which economic interests-and not individuals-organized and petitioned through the state. With Brazil at the center of this story of economic experimentation, Remaking Capitalism centers the Global South in the longer history of the production of economic thought. Drawing comparisons with the United States, Italy, and Portugal, Teixeira offers a transnational history of this important interwar attempt to create a third way between capitalism and communism"--

European colonisation has marginalised the `first peoples' in industrialised countries such as Australia and Canada. In remote regions, still the homes of large Aboriginal, Indian and Inuit populations, this legacy remains strong. Modernisation - the `boom and bust' model of state and private development - and the partial and biased assistance provided by the state have eroded many communities through their disregard for socio-economic structures and the beliefs which underpin them. Third World in the First explores the past, present and future of these peoples, their treatment by the `West' and the alternative strategies of development which might be available to them.

The growing exchange of traditional craft objects in world markets has had a profound impact on the lives of the women and men who produce them. These essays describe how the flow of goods from the industrial centers of the world to the colonies in earlier centuries is now met by a reverse flow as consumers seek the exotic and unique objects of handicraft production in Third World countries. The book explores the paradox of how artisans continue to create traditional objects, yet new sources of wealth and intensified production are transforming their traditional lifeways in areas such as the Oaxaca Valley, the Yucatan, Highland Chiapas, and Guatemala.

Since the 1989 fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Romania, arguably the most regimented of states in the Soviet bloc, has struggled with the transition from totalitarian state to democratic nation. In this insightful examination of modern Romania, Tom Gallagher provides an overview of Romania’s unique political and social history, focusing on both its national identity as well as the legacy of Soviet rule. Gallagher provides an in-depth look at Romania since 1989, focusing on the government’s attempts at economic reform, engagement with democracy, problems with corruption among the ruling elite, as well as the weakness of civil society and the resilience of implacable expressions of nationalism. Ultimately, Gallagher argues that thus far democracy has essentially failed in Romania. In fact, he warns that Romania is on its way to becoming one of the most unequal states in Europe and quite possibly a future trouble-spot unless efforts to resume much-needed reforms are undertaken.

How a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world. After the Second World War demolished the old order, a group of economists and policymakers from across Latin America imagined a new global economy and launched an intellectual movement that would eventually capture the world. They charged that the systems of trade and finance that bound the world’s nations together were frustrating the economic prospects of Latin America and other regions of the world. Through the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL, the Spanish and Portuguese acronym, cepalinos challenged the orthodoxies of development theory and policy. Simultaneously, they demanded more not less trade, more not less aid, and offered a development agenda to transform both the developed and the developing world. Eventually, cepalinos established their own form of hegemony, outpacing the United States and the International Monetary Fund as the agenda setters for a region traditionally held under the orbit of Washington and its institutions. By doing so, cepalinos reshaped both regional and international governance and set an intellectual agenda that still resonates today. Drawing on unexplored sources from the Americas and Europe, Margarita Fajardo retells the history of dependency theory, revealing the diversity of an often-oversimplified movement and the fraught relationship between cepalinos, their dependentista critics, and the regional and global Left. By examining the political ventures of dependentistas and cepalinos, The World That Latin America Created is a story of ideas that brought about real change.

Deals with the intersection of issues associated with globalization and the dynamics of core-periphery relations. It places these debates in a large and vital context asking what the relations between cores and peripheries have in forming our vision of what constitutes globalization and what were and are its possible effects. In this sense the debate on globalization is framed as part of a larger and more crucial discourse that tries to account for the essential dynamics—economic, social, political and cultural—between metropolitan areas and their peripheries.