ABSTRACT
Twentieth century brought a lively interest in Latin American economic restructuring. The policy episode that began in the 1980s, which the Inter-American Development Bank rightly labeled a silent revolution in economic policy, is only the latest of five restructurings that have been visited on the region since the arrival of Columbus. The first "structural adjustment" began when the Spanish replaced sundry indigenous economic systems with one that was more in accord with imperial aspirations and European norms. The third restructuring, a more ambitious enterprise than the second, arrived after a half century hiatus in which economic dislocation plagued the region with the arrival of independence. In the fifth restructuring, Latin American countries were counseled to make their economies more transparent and to address the seemingly intractable problems of huge disparities in the distribution of income. Compared with the high-performance Asian economies, the unequal Asian income distributions are more equitable than the least unequal of the Latin American cases.
