Celso Furtado’s contributions to structuralism and their relevance today

This article examines Celso Furtado’s three main analytical contributions to structuralism: (i) the historical-structural method, which incorporates the histories of Brazil and other Latin American countries in structuralist formulations; (ii) the belief that underdevelopment in the Latin American periphery has tended to persist over long periods owing to the difficulty of overcoming underemployment and to inadequate diversification of production; and (iii) the idea that the pattern of investments in the periphery is predetermined by the composition of demand, which mirrors and tends to preserve income and wealth concentration. Events in Latin America in the past twenty-five years show that Furtado’s analysis has lost none of its relevance.