What is 'Neo-Liberalism'

Max Sawicky sawicky at bellatlantic.net
Fri Jun 22 11:29:04 PDT 2001



> But to say that the current state of Chile's economy demonstrates how
> awful the economic consequences of "neoliberal" policies are seems to
> me to reveal an extraorinarily large disconnect from reality...
. Well yes, Chile's p/c GDP has grown a lot faster than the other neoliberal Latin American countries'. But compared with non-neo-liberal S. Korea, has Chile really "developed"? It seems like all the income growth has come from extracting more fish, trees, berries and copper -- rather than scaling the technological hierarchy. Off the top of my head, I can name Samsung, Daewoo, Hyundai, and Kia. How many world-class Chilean companies can you name? Seth

Yeah. Seeing as how the export of raw materials, basic commodities is sort of a wash, in terms of income accounting w/'natural capital,' that would seem to imply that neo-liberal success should be gauged by, *among other things*, the extent to which it exports manufactured goods, agricultural produce, and services. Everybody can't be a net exporter, but everybody can have a net trade balance of zero. So for an open economy, we should be worried if imports of finished products are offset by exports of stuff in more-or-less finite supply; this connotes unsustainability. If this makes any sense, how do neo-liberal success stories (sic) stack up, once we go beyond the highest aggregate of GDP? It's nice for India to export computer code, but how does the growth of these and similar sectors stack up to the future needs of the economy as a whole?

mbs



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