The past two decades have seen an enormous proliferation in writings on economic development, planning, and programming. Equipped with the aggregative tools of economic analysis acquired since the Thirties, economists have searched for methods and policy measures by which to further economic development. In many developing countries the government has assumed the responsibility of pursuing a deliberate, rational, and consistent economic policy in achieving the objectives of development, in accordance with established priorities, by direct and/or indirect interventions into the performance of the economy. With this expanded role of the public sector, the budget has come to acquire an important role as a policy instrument, since it reflects the qualitative and quantitative aspects of public policy, and puts into effect public policy measures influencing economic activity.

After more than a decade of experience, Venezuela's policy planning establishment has come to demand increasingly high levels of performance from its staffs in response to the increasing complexity of the planning tasks proposed. The need to plan for the effects of changing demographic characteristics and to cope with the widespread consequences for the dynamics of family patterns and social interaction that these changes imply, for example, has forced the development planner to search for new tools of analysis which will allow him to gauge accurately the impact of various policy alternatives.

The Central Working Document for the Latin American Bishops' Conference, which met in the summer of 1968, in the industrial city of Medellín, after the Eucharistic Congress in Bogotá, mentioned in its introduction neither pastoral nor theological questions. It began with a matter-of-fact analysis of Latin American reality, discussed the underdevelopment of the subcontinent in sociological terms, and demanded finally a commitment from the Church to the social problems of hunger and misery, which the document stated are the urgent questions upon whose solution the future of Latin America depends. Hesitation on the part of the Church to do its share in creating a more free, more just, and more humane society would be tantamount to being in the state of mortal sin.

Frederick P. Bowser has observed that: “Literature is perhaps as precise a way as any other to determine the attitudes held by racial groups toward each other, but for Spanish America very little systematic investigation has been done in this regard.” This field of investigation now is somewhat better off than the handful of items he mentioned would suggest. Most of this research has been carried out in the last ten years as an increasing number of scholars are realizing that blacks have participated integrally throughout the literary history of Spanish America, both as characters and as authors, and that unlimited possibilities exist for research on black themes in Spanish American literature in general and on Afro-Spanish American literary expression in particular.

During the 1960s, several academics from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chile became involved in a dispute concerning the aims of both the philosophical discipline and the university as a whole. Because this dispute turned into a conflict of national proportions and brought about the collapse of the administrative structure of the university in May of 1968, it raises a number of questions abut the motivations of these academics and the extent to which the philosophical discipline, as cultivated in Chile, inspired their words and deeds in relation to university affairs.

Although they represent a principal source of data for demographers, population censuses have not usually been undertaken for the benefit of population analysts. In ancient times, population enumerations were usually linked to the collection of taxes or to military conscription. Although in modern censuses such motivations are not entirely absent, other important considerations have emerged, such as equitable apportionment of representation in legislative bodies, the compilation of voting lists, and the necessity of having an accurate basis for the distribution of governmental funds, programs, and social intervention efforts. Nevertheless, one basic fact has never changed: population censuses are undertaken by political entities with politico-administrative goals.

Research covered in this issue includes research being carried out by institutions on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. It also includes general coverage of broad research programs of organizations such as CIDA, PIIP, etc. The next issue will cover research on Latin America being carried out at institutions in the mid-western part of the U.S. and in the northern half of Latin America. Coverage of research on Latin American topics being carried out in Europe is reported in Boletín Informativo sobre Estudios Latinoamericanos en Europa, a journal edited by Professor H. Hoetink, under the auspices of the Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos. A new journal, Informationsdienst der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Deutschen Lateinamerika–Institute, second issue published in April, 1966, covers research on Latin America being carried out by German institutions. It is edited by Georg Thomas at Koln, Germany.