>My memory may be faulty, but was 3rd World borrowing that heavy in the
>early to mid-1970s when the accumulation regime's crisis became full
>blown? Didn't the borrowing really balloon in the late 1970s -- in
>that shuffling around of the petro-dollars -- resulting in the first
>debt crisis of the early 1980s?
Debt levels were rising in the early 1970s - significantly for Brazil - as this quickie table (from World Bank data) shows. But you're right that they accelerated in the later part of the decade.
EXTERNAL DEBT ratios to exports and GDP (%)
1970 1975 1980 1982 1990 2000 2003 debt/exports
Brazil 275.0 306.6 399.7 325.5 345.1 264.9
Mexico 232.4 280.0 191.4 78.1 71.2
Latin America/Caribbean 191.8 263.9 240.4 162.0 159.9 debt/GDP
Brazil 13.7 22.4 31.5 35.2 26.7 41.0 48.3
Mexico 20.0 21.2 28.8 48.0 41.3 26.5 22.3
Latin America/Caribbea 20.4 22.2 34.1 44.7 42.2 39.5 46.8
>With regards to the failure of import-substitution, I think it's still
>arguable whether the strategy itself failed, or the practice of it.
>Isn't it possible to think of, say, the Japanese or S Korean strategy
>as a variant of import-substitution, conceived of under an infant
>industry approach, but with a graduation criteria? Of course it's
>arguable that i-s created constituencies that could capture the state
>and permanently defer any graduation criteria.
There were elements of import substitution about the Japanese & Korean strategies, but the main emphasis was on exports, no?
Doug