Whether and how the international trade and investments of less-developed countries affect their patterns of income distribution has long been a matter of interest and debate. Classical economic theory has tended to be optimistic on this count based on the assumption that when poor, heavily populated countries specialize in and export the labor-intensive goods in which they are expected to have an advantage, they will grow fast and improve their income distribution as well. But while trade's positive impact on distribution may be the natural expectation when a country's exports are mainly labor-intensive manufactures, no such generalization is warranted when primary products dominate the export mix, even though one might still expect some loose tendency toward labor intensity. The distribution of rents associated with an export-specific input or inputs may be very concentrated (often the case with mineral exports) or relatively egalitarian (as with exports produced by small family farms), but political factors also affect who gets them. Other, less-direct effects may also be important, including the type of linkages from the export sector, the demands created by the income they generate, and the direction of government expenditure of the fiscal revenues resulting from the trade.

After a decade of debt crisis and severe economic decline, countries throughout Latin America are seeking radical new treatments for their economic ills. Under pressure from internal political actors, international lending and aid agencies, or some combination of these, many Latin American countries are turning to outward-looking development strategies to stabilize their balance of payments and revitalize economic growth. Serving as the centerpiece for the new strategies is the promotion of “nontraditional” exports.

José Carlos Mariátegui devoted the most productive years of his short life (1894–1930) to analyzing contemporary Peru. Because of this emphasis, a substantial portion of the research conducted in the past thirty years has addressed his political and social thought. More recent investigations, however, have sought to document the significance of his aesthetic ideas, an appropriate development in light of Mariátegui's extensive writings on literature and the visual arts. For example, the periodical Amauta, which appeared under his editorship twenty-nine times between September 1926 and March 1930, was primarily a magazine of the arts and intellectual life, notwithstanding its political agenda and indigenista orientation. Also, Mariátegui's detailed essay on Peruvian literature, “El proceso de la literatura,” is the most extensive of the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928). In addition, between 1924 and 1930, the widely read Lima weeklies Variedades and Mundial regularly published his critical articles on national and international topics, including a large number of pieces on literature and the arts. Recent inquiries into Mariátegui's literary thought have addressed such issues as his modern concept of literary realism, the relationship between his artistic concerns and a Marxism that has been repeatedly characterized as “open,” and the role of aesthetic issues in his social agenda for Peru. This research has established Mariátegui's importance in the arts, not as a creative writer (although he did write poetry, plays, and short stories in his youth) but as one of Latin America's first practicing literary critics.