Although the different phases of each country's development are far from being synchronous, in general Latin America's growth in the postwar period began to change pace and pattern around the mid- 1960s, then again following the oil crisis of 1973, which ushered in a slowdown of the world economy, only to plunge into crisis anew early in the 1980s.

As discussed in Altimir (1994a), during the 1950s and 1960s, growth — i.e., at substantial rates, greater than 2%per capita — was either unequal (as in Brazil or Chile in the 1960s) or else involved an increase in inequality in the 1950s that was followed by a phase of inequality that remained essentially unchanged throughout the 1960s (as in Argentina, Colombia or Mexico).