Developmentalism and the Latin American State: The Statecentric Logic

The pursuit of development in Latin America has historically coexisted with a vision that overlapped with the perspective of economic growth and socio-economic development. Even Latin American structuralist schools, during their initial historical phase, were unable to establish limits between growth and development. Thus, the vision for development in Latin America was moulded based on the logic of the Western model, particularly the Anglo-Saxon model. However, as part of this model, in subsequent phases, important issues relevant to the Latin American structuralist approach, such as structural heterogeneity, surfaced as a negative consequence of this growth process. The developmental logic in Latin America had a reachability that was capable of influencing both left and right thinking (Bielschowsky, 2004, Dutra, 2013). Generally, all Latin American developmental models had the State acting as a central agent with a capitalist approach for growth. Therefore, the derived demand behaviour (Oliveira, 2015) was observed during production expansion and productive retraction. Note that this State-centred logic, or statecentric, later became a key feature of Latin American capitalism. In this study, we interpret and analyse the statecentric logic and its influence on the development of Latin American Peripheral Industrial Capitalism.