For decades F. H. Cardoso has been among the most influential of Latin American scholars, his writings on globalization, dependency, and politics having reached a world-wide audience. This book, the third by Cardoso to appear in English, is the first to incorporate essays written during his tenure as president of Brazil. The transformation of Cardoso's economic and political approach is nowhere better documented than in this broad-ranging collection of writings that span Cardoso's early theoretical work through his pragmatic agenda for Brazil in a rapidly changing world economy. The book also traces the development of one of the world's leading intellectuals, who took theory into the arena of policy when he became head of state.

At the end of World War II, several Latin American countries seemed to be ready for industrialization and self-sustaining economic growth. Instead, they found that they had exchanged old forms of political and economic dependence for a new kind of dependency on the international capitalism of multinational corporations. In the much-acclaimed original Spanish edition ("Dependencia y Desarrollo en America Latina") and now in the expanded and revised English version, Cardoso and Faletto offer a sophisticated analysis of the economic development of Latin America. The economic dependency of Latin America stems not merely from the domination of the world market over internal national and 'enclave' economies, but also from the much more complex interact ion of economic drives, political structures, social movements, and historically conditioned alliances. While heeding the unique histories of individual nations, the authors discern four general stages in Latin America's economic development: the early outward expansion of newly independent nations, the political emergence of the middle sector, the formation of internal markets in response to population growth, and the new dependence on international markets. In a postscript for this edition, Cardoso and Faletto examine the political, social and economic changes of the past ten years in light of their original hypotheses.

Most studies of the world economy focus on highly developed countries and only on economic strategies. The New Global Economy in the Information Age is unique in integrating the political with the economic and in the truly global view it takes of the changes under way. It focuses on the effects of new computer and telecommunications technology in conditioning the policy choices of nation-states in both the less and more economically developed regions of the world.

The authors analyze the new economic context in which nation-states operate, the main issues confronting them, and the way in which the politics of national development should change in the post-Cold War information age. They argue that the new world economy cannot be separated easily from the new world society, and that national and international politics is the cement binding the two.