CIAO DATE: 10/2014
April 2011
Centre for Strategic Research and Analysis
In the most recent attempt of Latin America‟s primary intellectual hub to res-pond to the world-wide financial crisis, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) argued for the need to tackle „growth with equity‟ as an organising principle of development strategies in the Americas. Crucially, this opens up two main discussions. Firstly, neoliberal economics, tho-ugh a complex political project aimed at controlling inflation, curbing state inef-ficiency and addressing debt management via fiscal discipline, has failed to deli-ver its promise of economic development through unfettered market opening. After twenty years of reforms, uneven patterns of economic growth, sustained inequality, and environmental exploitation have been its key consequences for Latin American countries (CEPAL 2010: 17, 20, 53). Having said this, macroecono-mic stabilisation policy has been widely adopted since the debt crisis, which suc-cessfully addressed fiscal disequilibria and is now considered a pillar of sound policymaking in the region and elsewhere. But as neoliberal reforms induced the eclipse of state activism, social inequality remains unaddressed, even in cases where sustained economic growth was occurring, specifically Chile whose growth hardly came together with social equality despite the rhetoric of its left-centre La Concertación governments. Equality, whether in terms of access to the market or to decision-making, does not come naturally with economic growth.
Resource link: Whither Neoliberalism? Latin American Politics in the Twenty-first Century [PDF] - 1.6M