The Political Economy of Development and Integration: A Structuralist Perspective

This chapter provides a summary of the structuralist critique of free-market capitalism, focusing on the tendency of the global market to keep peripheral countries underdeveloped. Also, it will describe the historical-structural method of Latin American structuralists, arguing that this method enables an understanding of the interactions between peripheral countries and the world economy from a political economy perspective, and thus allows analysts to avoid the conventional static and economistic interpretations.