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The article integrates a baseline Kaleckian model with a balance of payments constrained growth for addressing the interaction among: income distribution, international competitiveness and environmental innovation taking into account the proactive role of environmental policies The crucial link is given by intermediate inputs (raw materials and energy) in the Kaleckian price equation, which impacts on real wages, the wage share, the rate of capital utilization (and hence growth) and international competitiveness (through changes in domestic prices for a given international inflation rate). It is shown that an economy which has higher energy efficiency will attain at the same time a higher wage share and higher growth. Being green not only helps attain a more sustainable growth path, but also a more inclusive one both in the short run and the medium-run. In the long-run, within a balance of payments constraint, the combination of green taxes with an industrial policy aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of production and the diversification of the economy is crucial to raise the wage share and sustain growth.

In this report, we stress the importance of structural change and productive development as leading engines of post-Covid economic recovery. We do so by first putting emphasis on the perverse relation between underdeveloped productive structures and the intensity of the Covid-19 crisis. We then look at factors that may have harmed productive development in emerging and developing (EDE) countries over the last forty years. We investigate the role of (non-FDI) net capital inflows as potential source of premature de- industrialization in a wide range of EDE countries, Latin American ones in particular, in the context of increasing financial integration. Our analysis intends to verify whether periods of abundant capital inflows to EDE economies may have fed perverse structural changes away from those sectors, namely manufacturing, traditionally recognized as prime sources of long-run development. We consider a sample of 36 countries from 1980 to 2017. We find that manufacturing employment and GDP shares tend to contract more substantially and the economic complexity index decreases during episodes of financial bonanza. Given this evidence, we discuss policies that may support transformative post-Covid recovery. We first consider available space for expansionary fiscal policy and public investment-centered recovery plans as influenced by the degree of financial integration characterizing EDE countries. We then analyze whether macroprudential policies taming international capital mobility may bear positive effects for long-run productive development on top of their implications for (short-term) financial and macroeconomic stability.

La edición especial de la Revista CEPAL que presentamos ha sido elaborada en el contexto de la crisis sanitaria ocasionada en 2020 por la propagación de la enfermedad por coronavirus (COVID-19) a escala mundial. Junto con esta pandemia se ha desencadenado también la más aguda crisis económica del capitalismo global desde la Gran Depresión de la década de 1930. En términos más amplios, se trata de una grave crisis humanitaria que ha costado millones de vidas humanas, truncadas por el contagio del virus, así como pérdidas de producción y empleo que se han traducido también en deterioro de las condiciones de bienestar material de vastos segmentos de la población mundial (sobre todo en materia de salud, educación y nutrición) y, por lo mismo, en fuertes retrocesos en materia de pobreza y distribución de los ingresos. En esta sombría escena mundial, América Latina ha resultado ser una de las regiones más afectadas por la pandemia, situación que no es casual en el marco de las asimetrías internas y externas que configuran su disfuncional estilo de desarrollo, patrón que las literaturas estructuralista y neoestructuralista han descrito en numerosos escritos en los que se analiza la dinámica socioeconómica y ambiental de la región en diferentes estadios históricos. UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (IIS)