Conclusion

Criticism of the structuralist theory of inflation of course did not spell the end of structuralism as a broad anti-market ideology, either in developed or developing countries. In developed countries the doctrine of market failure has come under increasingly critical scrutiny, broadly on the ground, as H.G. Johnson once put it, that ‘the possibility of market failure is not sufficient to prove the certainty of government success’. The price system, with all its acknowledged defects, may yet, on balance, be the lesser evil, compared with the operation in practice of bureaucratic planning and controls – controls which are often, as at least one contributor to the Latin American debate pointed out, a major source of the very rigidities which hamper the working of the price system.

The text leads to the following conclusions:

Item 2 - The structuralist theory of inflation can better be understood as a broad anti-market ideology.