ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the economic foundations of Latin America’s expanding role in the international community: the size and structure of the region’s economy, and the economic growth potential. It examines Latin America’s linkages to the world community: trade relations, supply of critical raw materials, and levels of overseas investment, particularly from the United States. Latin America has been one of the most rapidly developing and most economically advanced regions of the developing world. Latin America’s relations with the United States and the world outside the hemisphere are directly influenced by the nature of economic interactions. The Latin American countries are important sources of raw materials for the industrial economies of the world and important markets for the products of those economies. In 1975, the Latin American regional economy was 70 percent the size of the Japanese economy, the third largest in the world.
