Year: 1966
Type: article
Abstract: T HE ECONOMY of Saio Paulo is generally regarded with admiration by foreign observers because it exhibits a very high degree of development-higher, perhaps, than any other regional economy of Latin America. The state's per capita annual income is $575, equal to that of the Italian central and northeastern regions. Industry provides a third of the area's output and is, furthermore, highly diversified and sophisticated, including motor vehicles, petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals.' Although immigrauts, foreign-branch factories, and state-owned enterprises have come to share in the ownership of this dynamic economy, the greater part of the wealth of Sao Paulo remains in the hands of its original owners: the coffee plantation aristocracy. From several points of view this is a curious phenomenon. The culture of Latin America is often judged by observers to contain elements that inhibit entrepreneurship ;2 yet here is a region that displays unconcern for such apprehensions. Is its culture in some regard different from that of other areas of Latin America? The Paulista, with his habitual self-confidence, declares that it is and evokes the bandeircnte, that seventeenth-century slave and gold hunter, as a culture hero, who passed on something unique to his descendants. Those who initiate one stage of economic growth often seem incapable of transferring their capital and efforts to more complex forms of production. Latin American landowners are considered to be particularly defective in this regard. Entrepreneurship, it has been theorized, is characteristic of groups that have suffered some
Author: Warren Dean
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2333030654