اقتصاد سیاسی و توسعه اقتصادی آمریکای لاتین در نیمه دوم قرن 20 ام

The paper analyzes and compares stages and strategies of economic development in Latin America, focusing on the past fifty years. It contrasts the economic rationales and political economy bases of iport substitution with those of the economic reforms implemented in the last two decades of the 20th century. It concludes that while economically weak and practically faulty, the import substitution strategy had a solid political economy behind it, which made it last. Market reforms, on the contrary, while having a sound economic justification, had weak political economy support. This has led to their limited success and increasing unpopularity in the region in a short period of time. Reforms need a viable political economy leg to rest on. Without it, they are destined to be abandoned.

Extensive growth came to most of Latin America several decades after it attained political independence. Traditionally, the years between 1840 and 1880 are considered the beginning of this phase (Reynolds, 1983). By then, post-independence politics had sufficiently stabilized and domestic institutions consolidated in much of the region that knowledge and capital (domestic and foreign) were being attracted and accumulated on a scale sufficient to underwrite rapid expansion of domestic output. To put things in some perspective, it is worth recalling that most of Latin America reached independence and statehood between 1810 and 1820, about 50 years before Italy and Germany, and started growing intensively (i.e. in terms of per capita income) slightly earlier or at about the same time as these second generation growers in Europe.1 From 1870 to 1913, Latin America aggregate (real) output grew at about 3% a year, faster than in continental Europe, and not far from the pace at which it expanded in the United States and Australia.2 The areas of new European settlement in both the Southern and the Northern Hemisphere were catching up fast in terms of total output growth with the growth leader until then—the United Kingdom. Only a substantially higher rate of expansion of the resident population, caused by exceptionally large immigration from Europe was preventing South America from catching up also in terms of per capita output, as North America was already doing. Between 1851 and 1880, 1 million people immigrated to Argentina and Brazil alone, which had by then a total population of about 8 million. From 1881 to 1915, another 7.1 million people immigrated to these two nations.

On the whole, a pervasive political economy failure appears to lie at the basis of much of Latin America's economic meandering in the 1990s.50 Internal support for reforms was apparently overestimated at their start. Time necessary for them to have effects and associated short-term costs were underestimated at home and abroad, and insufficient room for consumption smoothing was built into them. Thus, built-in room for policy mistakes was minimal. Slow and intermittent delivery of benefits prevented additional support from materializing on time. In fact, it contributed from within to push policies towards greater discontinuity and often expediency. Absorbing unforeseen (and to some extent unforeseeable) external (and some internal) shocks, without changing the thrust of policies that was still present, became almost impossible. Governments were ineffective in communicating with their public opinions and even more so in lining up allies for the new course. Critics were left an open field in debasing even its modest achievements, ostensibly on grounds of worsening equity (which seems to have occurred) and increasing poverty (which instead did not take place, at least in general51), and in part of growing corruption, but in reality by harping on many of the growing uncertainties and fears being arisen inside the middle and lower middle classes of Latin America. Thus, an entirely plausible and possibly quite appropriate, change in development strategy for much of a vast and critically important region of the world became rather quickly a political orphan, deprived of even a minimally effective political support at critical junctures. This is the clear, if still puzzling, overall outcome that emerged in the 1990s in most of Latin America.