Industrialization and Transnational Corporations in Latin America

This chapter aims to make a general historic survey of economic development and industrialization in the Latin American region. The industrialization in that region, and especially the import-substituting industrialization of manufacture of durable consumer goods such as automobiles and electrical-electronic machinery, which is the main target of our book’s consideration, cannot be discussed without mentioning the existence of transnational corporations. In the region, with a big presence of American and European enterprises and with the region’s historical and geographical relationships also reflected, those enterprises can be thought to have taken leading roles in molding and developing the automobile and electrical-electronic industries there. However, Japanese enterprises also made inroads into this field of industry from around the 1950s and 1960s. In this chapter we discuss the strategies of transnational corporations deeply involved in industrialization and its process in the region, referring to the actions of Japanese-affiliated companies as much as possible because it is the object of our book. First of all, we will look back at the period of import substitution until around the 1960s, including the historical background of industrialization. Next, we will look at the heavy chemical industrialization (the second import-substituting industrialization) which proceeded at about a fast rate around the 1960s (from the late 1950s), mainly focusing on the situation of the automobile and electrical-electronic industries.