Freeing markets and democratizing economics : regional development, global integration, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This paper belongs to a collective series initiated by Glenda Sluga’s working paper “TwentiethCentury International Economic Thinking, and the Complex History of Globalization: A New Research Agenda,” as part of the ERC-funded ECOINT platform. It contributes to advancing knowledge about the role of international economic thinkers at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) in the global “struggle over the economic ideas that have shaped the paths of globalization” (Sluga, 2021). It is designed to provide research material for our joint work, to contribute to the general discussion with original ECOINT-oriented questions, and to set a research agenda for further exploration of ECOINT issues in and from the Latin American and Caribbean context. In the following pages, the CEPAL is considered simultaneously as a site for debates on international economic ideas; a producer of economic theory, knowledge, and data; and a “meddler” in an ecosystem of international organizations that compete to provide advice and technical assistance to member states. Latin America, the Caribbean, and their international regional organizations are thus not considered here as mere peripheries, receptacles for ideas developed elsewhere and extended to a “Third World” that is the subject of all concerns but excluded from sites of knowledge production and decision-making. This report focuses as much on the institutional and political dynamics of the CEPAL and the social trajectories of its actors, as on the ideas that flourished there and spread around the world. Therefore, in a methodological effort to develop a “cosmopolitan” perspective on ECOINT questions (Selchow, 2020), this report includes non-English literature (not just primary sources), and, in this regard, welcomes the wealth of literature in Spanish, Portuguese, and French. In search of the invisible women who have contributed to original economic thinking, I also propose in annex a list of works authored by women between 1948 and 1995. This list completes the only, but not exhaustive work that exists on the topic (Betancourt and Espinel, 2018).