ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the origins of structuralism, both in the broader sense and in the more specific context of Latin American structuralist theories of inflation, and the links between them. Inflation had bedevilled economic policy in most Latin American countries for many years, and structuralist-type arguments had been put forward by opponents of liberal economic policies from time to time, in Brazil as early as 1949. Some emphasized the inadequacy of prices as a guide to investment decisions. Criticism of the structuralist theory of inflation of course did not spell the end of structuralism as a broad anti-market ideology, either in developed or developing countries. In developed countries the doctrine of market failure has come under increasingly critical scrutiny, broadly on the ground, as H. G. Johnson once put it, that 'the possibility of market failure is not sufficient to prove the certainty of government success'.
