Robert F. Kennedy's observation that “progress is a nice word..but change is its motivator and change has its enemies,” could have been made for the remaining six, all physically small, British dependent territories in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands (BVI), Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). The persistent refusal by the majority of their respective peoples to consider independence, despite, in some of the territories, its propagation by political leaders and its blandishment — at least until recently — by the British, seems an anachronism.

The aim of public policy is to create an environment within which economic agents can produce efficiently the composite commodities, and components thereof, which are needed to satisfy their economic needs.

With the outbreak of the Latin American debt crisis in late 1982, nervous bankers and hard-pressed debtors turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for both short-term finance and macroeconomic advice. By 1985, however, steadily increasing inflation and stagnant output reduced what little appeal such orthodox IMF programs had ever enjoyed. In late 1985 and early 1986, Argentina and Brazil adopted new “heterodox” stabilization programs, whose essential elements included income policies to break inflationary inertia, monetary reform (especially the creation of new currencies), and a verbal commitment to fiscal restraint.

In recent years, price increases in the inflation-prone countries of Latin America have accelerated from their former customary pace of 2 low digits to 3, 4, or more digits and are inflicting much more economic, social, and political damage than the old, slower price increases ever did. The joint (and inter-related) effects of the debt crisis plus galloping inflation have stopped income growth, reduced per capita income, lowered real salaries, increased unemployment (and underemployment), impaired income distribution, increased absolute poverty, and provoked urban riots.

Traditionally most North Americans look upon the English-speaking Caribbean primarily as a place for tourists to pursue their quest for the three S's: sun, sand and surf— a perspective which generates little, if any, concern for the region's political dynamics. Indeed, the prevailing attitude seems to be that these countries, known collectively as the CARICOM states, are not politically important because they are so small and thus not worth the time of US officials or political analysts. However, in the early 1980s this attitude began to change as the Reagan administration elevated the entire Caribbean Basin to the status of a major global trouble spot, on the grounds that the US had vital interests there which were being threatened by Leftist-inspired subversion and which required major economic/security initiatives in order to pacify the area. Although most of Washington's energies and resources were focussed on Central America, the English-speaking territories (e.g., Jamaica and Grenada) also came under close scrutiny.

It is the most common presumption that the relative priority accorded to education in an economy is significantly determined by economic conditions, particularly by the national income per capita and the budget. However, under normal conditions of economic well-being, allocation of resources to education is generally found to be least influenced by economic factors in any important way. Economic ability factors like GNP per capita and public spending on education are not significantly related. Neither are criteria for efficiency, like the rate of return to education, found to influence policies which allocate resources to education (see Tilak, 1982).

Under what conditions may a social scientist legitimately pass judgment on the geopolitical climate of a region? The question is not easy to answer. First, it presupposes acknowledgement that there are value issues embedded in such judgments. Second, while a value-free attitude may indeed be attempted, such an attitude is difficult to achieve. All too frequently, evaluation of a region's “climate” is based on the values of the evaluator (and often without disclosure of this fact to unsuspecting readers).This is especially likely when the observer adopts a theoretical position, taking insufficient account of the tension between society and actors. Unfortunately, such theories give social scientists the false feeling that they have some sort of preferred cognitive vantage point. Theories which incorporate an “oversocialized conception of man” (Wrong, 196l) or, alternatively, an “overly psychological conception of society,” ignore the fact that people act and make decisions about those actions, both of which are based upon value-judgments, and which do not have a one-to-one correlation with any given social situation.

Economic growth and government policies in small Caribbean countries have been conditioned (1) by the very large fluctuations in their external sector which continuously change the relative profitability of the various productive sectors of their economies, greatly complicating the macroeconomics management of their economies; (2) by the attempts of their governments to cope with those fluctuations; and (3) by the political economy relations that prevail in those countries, and that determine the nature of government intervention and the role of the private sector.

The aim of this article is to present and comment briefly on the tendencies and changes that have occurred in the organization of the Chilean industrial sector during the 1970-80s. First of all, it must be borne in mind that this was one of the most unstable periods in Chilean economic development, due both to the profound political changes that have taken place in the country and to the great instability of the international economy. These situations have affected the structure of the industrial sector in such a way that it is impossible to analyze it exclusively in terms of the performance of traditional indicators, such as production, employment, productivity, trade, and so forth. The transformation of the system of economic organization in Chile has brought about radical changes in the international insertion of the economy, the price system, the distribution of income, the structure of property, and the relations between the state and the private sector, which cannot be disregarded in an analysis of this nature.

Although decentralization is probably the institutional reform most frequently proposed for Third World countries, it has proven to be an elusive topic for both practitioners and analysts of development. Studies of centralization and decentralization are overwhelmingly descriptive, formalistic, or episodic. This article attempts to improve our understanding of how macro-political factors affect the adoption and implementation of decentralization policies in Latin America.