Desenvolvimentismo: A construção do conceito

This paper aims to formulate a concept of developmentalism from the Latin American historical reality. It's observed that the term qualifies manifold phenomena, in the past and in the present, without efforts on its delimitation. Thus, the concepts polysemy becomes ambiguity about its denotative spectrum. The concept is perceived as corresponding both to a range of historical phenomena of economic policy and to ideological phenomenon on political discourse. Acknowledging Giovanni Sartori's methodological framework on classical concepts, the work intends to delimitate a core set of categorizing attributes of developmeantalism based on the evolution of the economic thought about the term and the historical experience of Latin America.