ABSTRACT
The Latin American debt crisis has given rise to a voluminous body of literature. The industrial retrogression of Latin America had no precedent in the postwar period. By 1983 the degree of industrial development in the region had regressed to the level of 1966. Individual national responses to deindustrializing trends varied significantly. In Argentina and Peru the degree of industrialization in 1983 was down to the level of 1960, whereas in Chile and Uruguay the equivalent of the 1983 level had to be sought in 1950. The lower industrial dynamism of Argentina and Chile is a fact of long standing, prior to the adoption of open-economy and liberalization policies. In Chile, unlike Argentina, a change occurred in the late 1970s in the export breakdown—in favor of industrial items. In Argentina and Chile the open-economy policies applied in the 1970s had a heavy anti-industry bias. Brazil is at the opposite extreme from Argentina.
