everything's really ok

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Sat Oct 14 02:21:47 PDT 2000



> Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 11:38:12 -0400
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> ... LatAm did pretty well in the 1930s - and on into
> the 1960s even.

Ditto, down this side. During the 1930s, Zimbabwe had rapid growth plus the beginning of its industrialisation. South Africa's annual growth from 1933-46 was 8%, plus mfg developed massively along the 40 km strip that (along with some extremely deep goldmines) separates my petit-bourgeois suburb from townships like Soweto (you can guess which way the wind blows)... and black wages relative to white wages rose 50%, the fastest-ever period of such growth. We'd attribute this success in part to the global payments freeze and the slowdown of trade, which both forced import-substitution industrialisation and slowed capital outflows.

Sure, having gold helped. Not for nothing was South Africa nicknamed "the prosperous undertaker in the plague."



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