The hypothesis of the external constraint on economic growth, articulated in Thirlwall's law, was a watershed in the analysis of the determinants of such growth in open economies. Subsequent extensions expanded the analytical scope of the law by including capital inflows for the financing of a sustainable current account deficit and capturing foreign currency outflows for the payment of interest on external debt. In that regard, given the growing importance of portfolio capital in current account financing, the authors of the present article modify the law as presented by Moreno-Brid (2003) and focus on foreign currency outflows for the payment of interest and dividends on portfolio capital. The empirical validity of this modification is tested on the basis of the cases of Brazil and Mexico, using quarterly series.
This article analyses the treatment of the State in Peripheral Capitalism: Crisis and Transformation, by Ra & uacute;l Prebisch, a work that represents the final phase of his thought on development and is closely bound up with the discussions published in the CEPAL Review. On the basis of a systematic study of the book and some of the discussions inspired by it, the article highlights the difficult-to-resolve analytical tensions between Prebisch's attempt to integrate the economic, social, political and cultural dimensions of development and his proposal for transformation, which is focused on technical rationality and State planning. The article reflects both the innovative nature of this final phase of Prebisch's thought and some of its theoretical limitations, and underscores the contemporary challenges associated with analysing the State from a critical perspective.
Fifty years after its inception, CEPAL Review continues to focus on the key categories proposed by Raul Prebisch and Anibal Pinto in its inaugural issue. This article links the concepts of power and styles of development, on the premise that Latin American structuralism is essentially a political economy of power, in which structured productive power is the substance of economic value. Styles reflect the historical distribution of the fruits of technical progress as determined by asymmetrical power relations within the centre-periphery system. This perspective remains fully relevant today and can be used to analyse twenty-first century capitalism, in particular the new forms of power associated with digital capitalism and platform economies, which pose unprecedented challenges for peripheral development and require regional integration strategies to be rethought.
