Conditionality, Restructuring, and the Reperipherization of Latin America
During recent decades, many Latin American nations have undertaken marketoriented economic reform programs. These reforms have arisen in response to perceived failures of the structuralist-inspired import substitution approach to development of prior decades. Structuralist policies were designed with hopes of narrowing the economic gap between the developed nations at the center of the world trading system and the less developed nations at the periphery. In a sense, neo-liberal reformers promise the same thing. The purpose here is to ask whether neo-liberal reform has fulfilled its promise or whether it has instead ushered in an era of reperipherization in Latin America. The paper begins with a review of the center-periphery distinction and briefly outlines the forces driving the neo-liberal reform efforts.