Competitividade e desenvolvimento: atore e instituicoes locais

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2002 by Boniface, Dexter S

Guimaraes, Nadya Araujo, and Scott Martin, eds. Competitividade e desenvolvimento: atores e instituicoes lociss. Sao Paulo: SENAC, 2001. Tables, maps, notes; paperback.

Offering a much-needed counterpoint to recent analyses of regional development and industrial restructuring in Western Europe, this volume also takes a cutting-edge look at the interplay between globalization, industrial relations, and subnational governance in Latin America. The volume's 19 chapters provide a rich mix of case studies and comparative analyses that span southern Europe, Latin America, and the United States, with a particular emphasis on Brazil, Mexico, and the automobile industry. The volume also features contributions by Brazilian policymakers, notably the late mayor of Santo Andre, Celso Daniel.

As the editors note in their introduction, Latin America finds itself in the midst of sweeping political and economic changes driven by global and national processes of democratization, decentralization, economic liberalization, and industrial restructuring. With these changes, the dominant pillars of the old development model (a regulatory and interventionist national state and large, vertically organized enterprises oriented toward production in the domestic market) have withered, and national planning strategies have been abandoned. At the same time, however, a range of subnational actors (local and regional governments; small, medium-sized, and large corporations; and civic associations) have risen to take development matters into their own hands. The new Latin American political economy therefore is defined by its changing spatial-sectoral contours. For instance, economic dynamism appears increasingly to create territorial "clusters," industrial districts and regional poles that are integrated into complex chains of national and global production.

This evolving context structures the main lines of inquiry pursued in the volume. At the broadest level, the contributors seek to theorize the new lines of cleavage, conflict, and cooperation emerging in the new, "post-Fordist" economy and, more practically, to determine which strategies are most effective in achieving development in this context (p. 17). At the same time, these scholars seek to uncover whether strategies that enhance economic efficiency can be reconciled with demands for greater equality and citizenship (p. 13).

Uniting these diverse issues in the book is a concern with the notion of governance, institutions and practices designed to coordinate (and thus render more efficient) economic activities among independent actors (pp. 13-14). Governance essentially describes mechanisms for overcoming collective action problems left unresolved by the operations of the free market (p. 206). As summarized by the editors, notions of governance typically encompass three basic elements: active coresponsibility in decisionmaking and implementation of policies, horizontal networks within and between organizations, and an emphasis on decentralized and participatory organizational structures. New forms of economic governance, in turn, raise two questions: why do such mechanisms materialize in some places and not in others, and why do some localities pursue strategies of industrial cooperation while others focus merely on reducing costs via price-based competition?

In bringing together case studies that explore these issues, this volume makes a significant contribution to the growing debate on the relative importance of public policies, private sector initiatives, and social capital in explaining the emergence of effective mechanisms for economic governance at the local and regional levels. If there is a single flaw to the volume, it is merely that this contribution would have been even greater had the book included one or more concluding chapters to integrate its valuable findings. The following provides a partial synthesis.

In discussing the Latin American context (and especially northern Mexico), Richard F. Doner and Eric Hershberg offer a markedly pessimistic assessment of the public sector's capacity to solve the collective action problems necessary to coordinate developmental initiatives. They conclude, "the central variable determining the effectiveness of governance institutions is the capacity of the private sector itself to forge cooperative relations across firms," something that is especially likely to occur in geographic clusters of firms (p. 233). Jorge Carrillo's case study of General Motors and Mexico's maquiladora industry provides partial confirmation of Doner and Hershberg's thesis.

Carrillo first traces how GM developed a lean (and highly profitable) export platform in northern Mexico. Shifting away from an emphasis on the domestic market (and its older "brownfield" operations in central Mexico), GM's globally oriented strategy took advantage of the north's proximity to the United States and cheap wages (not to mention the absence of labor organization and other favorable political-economic conditions). Carrillo outlines how GM's shift to the northern "greenfields" spawned a range of highly flexible maquiladoras in the auto parts sector, notably in Ciudad Juarez, where Delphi-GM developed one of the country's first technical research and development centers, the Centro Tecnico Juarez.1