On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 1:28 PM, <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> On Sun, February 28, 2010 12:42 pm, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>
> > Two scenarios come to mind: 1) the country shifts towards a
> > Cuban-model and isn't as wealthy as it is now and suffers greatly after
> > the collapse of the greater socialist bloc 2) the country follows the
> > trajectory of the rest of the center-left and is forced to shift towards
> > neoliberal austerity and the politics of the Third Way.
>
> No, there was also option 3: Chile could have responded to economic
> adversity by constructing its own developmental state. Japan, Taiwan,
> South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Austria and Finland all pulled this off
> in the 1970s. It's true Japan and Austria were already heavily
> industrialized at the time, but Taiwan and Korea were very much
> semi-peripheries in the 1970s, with factor endowments not so different
> from Chile and Argentina.
>
> And let's be clear about why it didn't happen: US imperial interventions,
> trade embargos, and military coups derailed or crushed Latin America's
> fledgling developmental states.
>
Isn't this what happened in the real world? Obviously Ginis are much higher in LA than east Asia, and so there were strategic differences with those countries, but whether because or despite the model it took, Chile is now conventionally regarded as a success story.