The project had three objectives: 1) To provide an analysis of the transnational intellectual search for an alternative to mainstream theories of trade and development; 2) to create a new body of knowledge on the historical trajectory of the regulation of global trade; 3) to promote scholarly awareness of the connections between Soviet economic thinking and alternative discourses about trade and globalization.
To work toward objective 1, over the past 12 months I conducted significant research on primary sources in English, Russian, and Spanish at Harvard’s Widener library and Lamont library. Both libraries contain hundreds of books, articles, and journals published in the USSR, in various Latin American countries, and in the English-speaking world. Over the 12 months of the grant, I was able to process and analyze 72 relevant issues of Latinskaia Amerika (“Latin America”), the Zhurnal Ekonomiki (the “Journal of Economics”), and Mirovaia Ekonomika i Mezhdunarodniie Otnoshenia (“World Economy and International Relations”), the three leading Soviet journals that dedicated articles and entire issues to the discussion of approaches to the international economy that came from Latin America. Likewise, I was able to process and analyze 34 relevant issues of the Revista de Economia (the “Review of Economics”), the main economics journal in Argentina, and of the Revista de Economia Polìtica (the “Review of Political Economy”), the main economics journal in Brazil. Moreover, I was able to access the personal memoirs of two leading Latin American economists that worked with Soviet colleagues in the context of the UN system: Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado. Finally, I also analyzed 13 issues of the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Political Economy, the two leading English-language publications that dedicated articles and overviews focused on alternative approaches to trade and development, including perspectives that came from Latin America and the socialist world.
Thanks to these materials, I have started drafting an article that investigates the relationship between Soviet and Latin American institutions in creating a new approach to global trade and development during the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, I have gathered sources that I hope will help me start drafting a second article, which will focus on intellectual exchanges between Soviet and Latin American economists. These were parts of objective 1.
The large amount of sources and materials that I have gathered while at Harvard will constitute the base on which to plan a scholarly monograph, entitled “Backward and Dependency: Parallel Lives.” This was the main aim of objective 2.
To work toward objective 3, over the past 12 months I presented papers related to aspects of the research project and disseminated my preliminary research findings at multiple international conferences and smaller-scale workshops. The research and dissemination work I carried out over the past year has greatly improved my career advancement prospect. I received two offers of employment from leading research institutions, and I have now accepted one.
