ok, atabey, let us try this again..once more, with feeling. let us address Milton Friedman, and his disciples, the Chicago Boys. you stated that Milton"s prescriptions would be " welcome here". really? let us see what they were, and what they did..
abolished the minimum wage
outlawed trade union bargaining rights
privatised the pension system
abolished all taxes on business profits and capita gains
slashed public employment
privatised 200 state industries
privatised 66 banks
turned a blind eye to usury and currency speculators
forbade the teaching of all economic theories besides monetarism in all universities.
sold off the banks at bargain basement prices to speculators like Grupo Vial, and Grupo Cruzat, at 40 cents on the dollar.
what did we get? well, in 1973, unemployment was 4.3 percent...by 1983, with monetarization , it was 22%
real wages fell by 40%
in 1970, 20% of population lived below the poverty level. by 1990, it was 40%
the Grupos siphoned off cash from their monopolistic positions, thyen leveraged these assets with loans from private investors in a monstrous ponzi scheme, involving, among other niceties, borrowing money from Chase Manhattan at 7% interest, then loansharking in Santiagi and Valparaiso at levels up to 120%. they eventually defaulted, and were indicted for fraud. by 1983, Chile swooned into depression and rioting.GDP fell by 19%. the country was in a state of depression. so, what did Pinochet do?

Pinochet renationalized the banks at a rate that Allende never envisaged. the pension scheme was back in public hands. a plan was devised to create 500, 000 jobs. Pinochet expropriated private property at will, with little or no compensation. so much for the neoliberal experiment. and, lest i forget, he told the Chicago Boys to take a hike. the day was saved by KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS, not the rampaging laissez faire, trickle down nonsense of Milton Friedman, whose ideas you assert would be WELCOME here.

Dread,


I think you can follow this paper. It's written in Spanish but the graphs speak for themselves.

Abstract
This paper examines the relative position of Chile through time and compared with other
emerging and industrial economies, using various economic development indicators,
particularly over the past two decades. It provides a descriptive analysis, without exploring
causalities or testing hypotheses on the economic growth of the country, but it allows to
reveal the strengths and weaknesses that serve as the base for growth policy discussion.
The comparison of economic development indicators shows that Chile is relatively strong
in macroeconomic stability, commercial and financial integration, quality of institutions,
and in the progress of other structural reforms that are manifested in its well-developed
capital market and private sector involvement in production. However, when it comes to
quality of education, technological innovation efforts, infrastructure quality and quantity,
and some social indicators, its performance is poor.

http://www.economia.puc.cl/docs/dt_287.pdf


The DR or any other similar Latin nation would salivate at the thought of being in Chile's shoes Dread.

i am very averse to publishing copy and paste articles, but salivate on this, atabey




Sarah Larrain is a former professor at the Catholic University of Chile, and is the coordinator of the Chilean Ecological Action Network. She is also co-founder of a new Chilean political party, the Partido Alternative de Cambio, and stood for the presidency of Chile in the 1999 elections. She was the principal author of a study, Sustainable Chile, that became the platform for her election campaign.
... The bloody coup in Chile in 1973 put in place a military government that was not trained to govern or administrate a country. Thus, it handed over these responsibilities to the business community, which, of course, had supported the coup. Following the guidance of corporations, the Chilean government began to redesign laws governing the economy and society. In addition, they began to redesign our constitution. The one they adopted in 1980 allowed corporations wide-ranging freedoms, based on the argument that this would lead to economic growth and political stability.
Another motivation for opening up the economy to foreign investment and for promoting exports was to try to regain international acceptance. After the coup, Chile was shunned by much of the international community because of the widespread human rights violations carried out by the junta.
Over time, Chile did indeed become the "Latin American tiger," with economic growth of 6 to 7 percent annually during the last 13 years. However, the competitiveness of the Chilean economy was based on natural resource exports, low wages, and unequal wealth distribution...
The military government changed both the mining code and the water code to attract foreign investment. One of these changes, Decree 600, stimulated large investments at the expense of the local communities and allowed companies to obtain water rights. These have led to a reduction in agricultural activities in some communities; many small farmers have been forced to abandon their lands.
To promote exports in the forest sector, the government introduced legislation like Decree 701, which subsidized between 75 to 90 percent of forest company costs, and freed the companies from taxes. This mechanism encouraged the big companies to substitute native forest with pine and eucalyptus and channeled 96 percent of the subsidies to the big farmers; only 4 percent has gone to small farmers.
As a result of these policies, Chilean exports in forest products increased 1,600 percent. According to our Central Bank, if present forest policies remain, native forests in Chile could disappear by the year 2025.
Similar policies to encourage increased exports have been imposed on the fishery and agricultural sectors. Today 90 percent of [Chile's] exports are natural resource products. To give a picture of the pressure this places on the environment, it's important to know that just 10 natural resource products make up 64 percent of Chilean exports. So the pressure on the environment is very focused, and of course it is this exploitation of our environment that has fueled our high economic growth rate.
This high growth rate has also had tremendous social costs. Our poverty rate grew from 20 percent of the population in 1970 to 40 percent in 1985. Today, after 13 years of 6 to 7 percent annual growth, almost 30 percent of the Chilean population (about 4 million people) still struggles at the poverty level. And poverty today is not because of the lack of jobs, since the unemployment rate is only 5 to 6 percent. The poor have jobs, but they have very low-paying jobs.
It's very clear that economic growth in Chile has been subsidized by low wages. This is continuing even now because after seven years of a transition to democracy, we are burdened with the same labor laws as were set in place by the companies during the dictatorship. Workers have no right to collective bargaining or to fight for higher pay. The final result is a very unequal distribution of income. Some 10 percent of Chile's population earn about 60 percent of the income, while the poorest 10 percent obtain only 1.7 percent. Sadly, in this kind of neoliberal export-oriented economic model, the income distribution is bad whether it's run by a dictatorship or a democracy. The income gap has continued to get worse during the period 1994 to 1996.
(In conclusion, I need to say that [Chile] is still making legislative changes designed to further promote our global competitiveness at the expense of the environment and society as a whole. For example, they are continuing to privatize the health system and the social funds, including the pension funds. This means that all areas in the country need to function as corporate departments, thus generating profits in all the different economic sectors. So the real problem here is that we have developed a corporate state with no concept of a social contract, and this doesn't really change with democracy. Trade liberalization, the free market, and the free society-these are all about having access to Coca-Cola, but not access to wealth, pensions, health care, or education. This is the case of Chile, and I think that many countries have their own similar story, with different characteristics but the same process.

Yes Yes Dread ! Zimbabwe in reverse ...with the revered Comrade Bob

you should consider reserving your comments for the home page. the forum is generally for people who have something intelligent to say, or are, at least, trying to make meaningful arguments. adolescent one liners are out of place here. we all know that you are little more than a repetitive irritant, but you should at least consider where your antics are best suited.

Copy and pasting serious academic works is NOT trivial Dread. I'm sorry you believe otherwise. I posted the link to the article, not a very long work by the way, and since it is germane to the discussion at hand, I reasoned that you would appreciate the effort. The article is a balanced work that denotes both positive and negative aspects concerning the Chilean Model. It does require reading however; and here I thought you one to appreciate such matters. Again, the graphs are pretty straight forward, so you don't have to read the entire paper.

atabey, i do not have to read yet one more treatise on chile to know what i need to know. what is salient is that you said that the prescriptions of Milton Friedman would be "welcome" in the DR. i have made the point that most of the developments in chile,AFTER the meltdown of the economy in 1983, were germinated by KEYNESIAN economics, not monetarism. the history shows that Friedman's extreme supply side model brought nothing but currency speculation, poverty, and inequality of wealth. it was a dose of keynesian economic prescriptions that set the country back on its feet. for that knowledge, i have read enough. as to countercyclical economic actions, that is nothing esoteric, and, in part, another keynesian prescription.

It was a dose of Pinochet dread

you are free to believe what you will..if you think it was pinochet, than that is what it was

Friedman was a crook!


IMF and others induce shock so they can impose capitalism for markets and
profit.

When will the next crisis hit us!

Coup of Chile was a shock to impose market capitalism.

Disaster Capitalism!



S.