The Latin American Economy and Its Main Countries from the Point of View of Economic Representativeness: The Industrialization Process of the Region

Abstract

With an enormous variety of political cultures and socioeconomic structures, Latin America stretches from Rio Grande to Antarctica, occupying more than 18 million square meters, with a population of more than one-half billion people. The 33 countries of the region, despite having problems and very diverse aspects one from the other, have very similar challenges. Thus, there are 100 million poor people of the region, and they are present in every country as well as enormous social inequality; corruption is endemic in the region. The economic history of the countries of Latin America is totally shared—from the substitution of imports during the 1960s and 1970s passing through galloping inflation in the 1980s and low inflation in the 1990s to the solution given to the foreign debt; all the questions were more or less common to almost all the countries, and generally they occurred at the same time.