As originally proposed in the early 1970s, the proto-industrialisation model was meant to serve as a more complete explanation of that phase in the general transition from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism rather vaguely referred to as the period of manufactures. Early proponents emphasised the role of proto-industrialisation in channelling development toward fully-fledged factory system industrialisation. Proto-industrial theories dealing with the complex interplay of economic, social, demographic, cultural and technological processes eliminate many of the uncertainties generated by the original debates over the general process of transition. Certainly, it is no longer possible to deny the contributions of rural/peasant non-agricultural productive activities to the development of early factory industry as a whole, as well as to social changes leading to the emergence of a proletariat.

The 1948 Costa Rican civil war stands as the most significant breakdown of emerging democratic practices in what many believe is a country with a democratic destiny. No other political conflict has so polarised the country and cost so many lives. Nor has any other civil war so influenced the way analysts view and understand the development of democratic institutions in Costa Rica. Why political actors in Costa Rica settled their disputes on the battlefield, however, is a question that has yet to generate a satisfactory response.

Constitutional issues are once again being considered from sociological and political perspectives, after many years of strictly juridical approaches. This renewed interest stems from both theoretical and practical concerns, raised by the multiplication of liberalisation and democratisation processes around the globe, as well as from the need to update and deepen the democratic content of stable democracies.

It is now a well-known sad story that Alan Garcia's APRA government initially raised high hopes within and outside Peru and then collapsed into incoherent policy-making and political chaos, with hyper-inflation and a drastic increase in insurgent violence as a result. The social costs of that collapse have been grave indeed, and the worst victims have been the nation's poor, who were already subsisting at deplorable levels prior to the crisis. Paradoxically, one of the priorities of the APRA government upon coming to power in 1985 was the improvement of the precarious situation of the nation's poor and marginalised population in the pueblos jóvenes–shanty-towns–and in the sierra. The APRA government introduced a variety of innovative strategies directed at these groups. The most highly publicised of those–the Programa de Apoyo de Ingreso Temporal (PAIT)–is the subject of this study.

Although peasants have always been linked to larger economic systems, the expansion of capitalist agriculture and the augmented incidence of migration throughout the Third World in recent decades have transformed the peasantry and made it reliant on wage work in labour markets tied to the world economy as never before. In Latin America this transformation has taken many forms, but the overwhelming direction has been towards changing subsistence farmers into wage labourers. The overall effect has been that few rural households persist independent of wage labour, while the majority combine income from resource-poor landholdings with wage earnings. The dependence on off-farm income is especially significant among smallholder farm families who derive the majority of household income from off-farm sources.

The recent experiences of transition to democracy in Latin America have taken place in circumstances which suggest a need to rethink the political and social dimensions of inflation. The experience of the 1980s reveals that the once familiar road which led from an inflationary spiral and a rising foreign debt to the collapse of democracy can also be travelled by other types of regime. The crisis of the bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, Chile apart, reflected an inability to deal with those same focal points of political and economic uncertainty. The sequence which runs from high (or hyper) inflation to political regime change may be neutral, in the sense that it is indifferent to whether the regimes affected are democratic or authoritarian.

Environmental issues have very obviously come to occupy a prominent place on the political agenda, both domestically and internationally. This process has been driven by grass-roots concern for the future consequences of environmental degradation, assisted in many cases by the adoption of the green movement and of green issues as a platform for protest on a broader range of social and political issues. National governments have increasingly taken up the cause of environmental protection, either out of genuine conviction or out of fear of the electoral consequences of not doing so. Internationally the emergence of green issues has been further encouraged by broader shifts in the international system and the declining salience of old issues, above all the changing nature of East/West rivalry.