Latin American structural change and development: Case studies of Mexico, Costa Rica and Brazil

What are the keys to growth and change in developing countries? What is the process which an economy undergoes in the transformation from a less developed country to a developed country? This study considers these questions by analyzing the growth and development, or structural change, of industry in the context of the Latin American experience from 1950 to 1980.The work is comprised of three sections. The first section discusses the importance of structural change, emphasizing the contributions of authors such as Chenery, Syrquin and Kuznets. The input-output tools which have been developed to analyze questions of this sort are also presented.In section 2 the chosen paradigms are applied to each of three countries in turn. These countries, (Mexico, Costa Rica and Brazil), are chosen as a sample embodying the most pertinent aspects of Latin American economies. The input-output techniques are used to select those sectors which are most significant to each country's development as well as those showing the greatest amount of variability. The author then discusses the economic policies and conditions within each country to isolate the factors which were most important in shaping the structural change process. Arguments are then forwarded showing the relationships between these economic policies and the associated structural changes.The final section compares the experiences of the three cases and summarizes the results. The author concludes by generalizing upon these results so as to form a broadly based theory of structural change.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio