Echoes of Georgescu-Roegen's thermodynamic view in Latin American development debates

Georgescu-Roegen is known both for his proposal of a paradigmatic shift in economics and for the difficult acceptance of his thermodynamic view among his peers. It was only with the development of modern ecological economics that his view became a foundational element of an economic approach. In Latin America, where economics was more pluralistic than in core countries, one might expect his ideas to have circulated more freely, even before ecological economics became institutionalized in the region. This article explores the reception of Georgescu-Roegen's thermodynamic view of the economic process within Latin American thought during the two decades following the publication of The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). His perspective found only limited resonance among Latin American developmentalists, including within the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), where references to thermodynamics did not generally result in a new biophysical view of development. By contrast, Georgescu-Roegen's ideas were more deeply integrated into the study of regional development in the Amazon, where they gave rise to an original formulation of regional development and ecologically unequal exchange based on the Entropy Law.