April 21, 2008  

The work of former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the centerpiece of a recent two-day conference at Watson, as his seminal research on economic development was revisited on the 40th anniversary of its completion and recast for today’s global economy.

The conference, International Inequality, Then and Now: Revisiting Cardoso and Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America, was organized as a capstone of Cardoso’s five-year term as a Brown professor at large based at Watson. For the occasion, Cardoso drafted a new paper, titled “New Paths: Reflections about Some Challenges of Globalization.” Leading thinkers on globalization, development, and democracy came to the institute, representing expertise in sociology, political science, economics, and law in various world regions.

Dependency and Development, co-authored with the late Chilean scholar Enzo Faletto, challenged conventional economic development theories of its day, such as the limitation of Latin American and other “peripheral” countries to agricultural production while more developed, “central” countries grew through manufacturing and other innovations.

As Cardoso reflected in “New Paths,” such structuralist arguments were expanded with historical and political aspects that conditioned the development of peripheral economies. He and Faletto shifted the emphasis to “the variability of the forms of integration to the world market and the existing alternatives for countries’ economic growth, even when in situations of dependency. … What we then called ‘the new form of dependency’ was, actually, the beginning of the process that would fully unfold later and be known as globalization.”

At the time of its release, Dependency and Development was like “a breath of fresh air,” said Peter B. Evans, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It provided “a way of moving beyond various opposed tendencies in the analysis of development,” such as what Evans called “abstract” modernization theory and “flat-footed theories of imperialism.” Instead, it introduced “a sense of political possibilities and a bias toward hope,” he said, while opening up comparative studies in development and helping shift the focus in economics beyond technology to the importance of institutions.

Today, especially given China’s growth and demand for raw materials, there has been an enormous revenue transfer from the center to the periphery through trade, Cardoso said. Latin America’s external accounts are positive, with developed countries today borrowing from developing countries. “There is a reverse; is this stable?” Cardoso asked.

His answer, underscored in “New Paths,” is that it depends on the way in which states react to the new situation. He urged policymakers to form a consensus on national targets and move forward, despite the challenges in anticipating what will occur.

“Everything will depend not only on the economy but also on the world political scene, and mainly, on the capacity of local societies and their leaders to frame policies, as much as possible consensual, that seize opportunities … and make the effects of globalization and democracy more favorable to the developing countries and to their peoples,” Cardoso said in “New Paths.”

Some of the papers from the conference will be published as part of a special issue of Studies in Comparative International Development, a journal edited at the Watson Institute. A separate edited volume is also planned, according to Richard Snyder, director of the Institute’s Political Economy of Development Program.

The conference represented a milestone within Watson’s Globalization and Inequality Initiative, launched last year by Institute Director Barbara Stallings.