Introduction

Abstract

The image of the ‘beggar seated on a bench of gold’ has often been used to exemplify the paradox of wealth and poverty in a country whose gold and silver in colonial times helped finance nascent European capitalism, but in which today poverty is more acute and widespread than in almost any country of Latin America. Lacking neither natural or human resources, Peruvians have been searching for the formula which ensures at once sustainable economic growth and the more equal distribution of wealth and power needed to establish a more stable economic and political system. The discovery of such a formula has long proved elusive.