Abstract

This study aims at to re-examinate the theories of inertial inflation in light of the
methodological debates on the determinants of the production of scientific knowledge in order
to understand whether inertialism was a scientific revolution in relation to the macroeconomic
paradigm of the first half of the 1980s and/or a continuation of the approach of the
1950s structuralists. For that, the study sought to identify a hard core of common theoretical
elements, by reconstituting the debate between monetarists and inertialists in the 1980s as a
second round of the monetarist-structuralist controversy of the 1950s. The results indicate
that inertialism is best placed as an alternative research program to the mainstream of the 1980s, but that it maintains a high degree of originality as a theoretical development from
the Latin American structuralist approach.

JEL Classification: B21, B59, E31.