The long anticipated collapse of the economies of Latin America is already underway. The facts:

1. • In Argentina, the currency devalued over 1,000% in less than four months and was close to a free fall as the Central Bank has no resources to stabilize the market and riots wracked provincial cities.

2. • Brazil approaches hyperinflation now running at close to 1,000% as the government has given up on trying to curb inflation through traditional means and resorted to extensive indexing to enable the people to cope.

During the radical period of the Forbes Burnham era in Guyanese politics, from 1970 to 1985, the country appeared to have won respect for its foreign policy in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and in the British Commonwealth, as well as in the broader Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The general perception was that Guyana was one of a select few small Third World states with a coherent revolutionary foreign policy, for which it paid a high price through superpower retaliatory efforts to destabilize its society.

Most economic models do not explicitly incorporate the “state” or the “government” into their analyses. Instead, this entity is viewed as a deus ex machina which plans and directs economic policy according to notions of efficiency, growth, distributional justice, and so on, that form the central concepts of the models. Unfortunately, the same naive thinking permeates a good deal of public policy analysis. This is the case, for example, with issues of development and underdevelopment. Here, attention is concentrated on “technical,” or “economic,” solutions, while taking for granted, either implicitly or explicitly, the existence of the political will necessary to implement them.

The relations between Argentina and the United States have been characterized by long periods of distrust and mutual hostility alternating with relatively brief intervals of rapprochement and collaboration. This pattern of habitual antagonism followed by sporadic reconciliation has turned the Argentine-US relationship into a peculiar case of rivalry in the interamerican scene. However, there has never been a period such as the one between 1980 and 1989, in which the bilateral relations fluctuated so widely between conflict and harmony.

Last January marked the 30th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, and it could be that, within a decade, that small islandnation will be transformed once again. Since 1959, Castro's Cuba has remained a politically repressive, economically stagnant, militarily adventuristic state. The legitimacy of the Cuban regime depends, in many ways, on the persona of Fidel Castro; when he dies, the government will face by far its severest test to date and, most probably, at a time when a potentially deadly economic and systemic crisis continues to threaten the Cuban polity. Revolutionary or reformist elements will almost certainly emerge to demand change.

It is logical to assume that small states focus more attention on the regional, subsystemic or “contiguous” environment (Reid, 1974: 31) than on the broader international system. Given their financial limitations, small states are circumscribed in their ability to influence the international environment but can be effective in the regional context. Even if some small states, by virtue of comparative wealth or ideological commitment, have the capability and inclination to exploit the international environment rather than confine their focus to the region around them, they still find their attention directed, to a large extent, to the immediacy of regional problems and to regional activities that are grounded in social, cultural, political, and economic linkages to the countries nearby. More often than not, economic ties have been formalized in regional integration movements patterned along the lines of the European Community (EC).

Segmentation in the labor markets refers to the fact that a single homogeneous market for labor, as assumed by conventional theory, does not exist. Its definition varies according to different authors. This article will refer to the concept as it is used in the discussion of economic development in Latin America: that is, that created by the type of development which generates a segmentation of the productive structure and, in turn, of the labor markets.

The most exciting prospect in Latin American political economy and public policy is the possibility of pursuing the objectives of equity and efficiency through the same neoclassical policy instruments. In light of conventional views, this convergence is remarkable, perhaps even shocking. We often juxtapose efficiency and equity, along with the ideological positions associated with each. It is common to link Leftist political approaches both to statism and to progressive income distribution, thereby linking statism to progress.

At the time of independence, CARICOM states found themselves extremely dependent upon the international economy, in part a legacy from the economic structure developed during their colonial period and in part due to the small size of their economies. Similar to most third world countries at the time, these economies relied heavily on one or two mineral and/or agricultural export commodities for foreign exchange, government revenue and employment. Furthermore, the prices of these commodities were subject to the vagaries of the international market, making the market for their exports unstable to an untenable degree for these vulnerable price-takers. This highly dependent state also exhibited many other well-known characteristics of underdevelopment, such as low levels of human resource development, savings and investment, technological capacity, and foreign exchange earnings.

The nomination of Carlos Andrés Peréz as the presidential candidate of Venezuela's Democratic Action party (Acción Democrática or AD) and his triumph at the polls in December 1988 are just the latest examples of the AD Labor Bureau's success in being on the winning side in electoral contests. AD-Labor's well-demonstrated political clout underscores the importance of the relations between the Labor Bureau and the AD organization. An examination of the interaction between the two is especially in order because AD has emerged as a leading Latin American member of the Socialist International (SI) with its social democratic doctrine which assigns the working class a major role in the party and in the gradual achievement of democratic socialism.

By now, it has become a platitude to proclaim that, over the past decade, Latin America has experienced its deepest, most prolonged economic recession in modern history. Nevertheless, this has indeed been the case. The magnitude and effects of the crisis have, of course, varied from country to country, and so have the policy responses. What is undeniable is that not one single country has escaped the recessionary impact of a complex combination of circumstances which appeared on the horizon in the early 1980s, and in which an adverse international economic environment played a prominent role.

Faced with limited opportunities for their primary-product exports, many developing countries have sought new strategies to develop manufactured products for export. Often lacking the necessary infrastructure for industrialization but possessing abundant labor resources, some developing economies have attempted to attract investment through assembly operations that promote domestic employment, exports, and local development.

The term “New Law of the Sea” may be misleading if it conveys the impression that classical Law of the Sea principles have been entirely supplanted by new norms. The distinction is not so sharp. It is true to say that there have been important developments in the Law of the Sea since World War II, but many of the old principles have remained intact. However, it is worth noting that in some cases they have been refined and modified, and in other cases they are stated with greater specificity.