ABSTRACT

This chapter begins with the limits of a normative approach to political economy to account for the centrality of the monetary and exchange rate regime as an impulse for re-industrialization. The monetary and exchange rate regime is, by its macroeconomic effects, a guarantee of the medium-term stability of growth. In the 2000s, Argentina and Brazil experienced a marked acceleration of growth through a simultaneous increase in domestic and international demand and exports – above all primary goods but also manufactured ones, though to a lesser extent. The chapter analyses whether these new data may or may not be considered as the beginning of a transition to a new mode of development with the internal market. Its possibility emerges as a result of a political change brought about by the two countries' financial crisis at the turn of the millennium. Political change is insufficient; it has in fact only allowed a marginal redefinition of the mode of regulation.