Institutions and Inequality in Latin America: Text and Subtext

Abstract

The production of inequality has been one of the most enduring features of Latin American economic and social systems, and one in which the institutional structure has perhaps exhibited the greatest consistency over time. In a very real sense, inequality is what the Mexican Revolution was all about, as was the Bolivian Revolution of the early 1950s. So, too, with the rise, in the middle decades of this century, of assorted populist political parties and movements. By the 1960s, participatory development had become almost a Zeitgeist, and distributional concerns had ostensibly come to suffuse many of the development programs launched during that first United Nations Development Decade, including the Alliance for Progress. It is relevant to recall that, quite early in the postwar flowering of development studies, Viner (1952) had suggested that the chief aim (and test) of development should be the reduction of mass poverty.