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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Reid
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July 10 - August 10, 2018
The productivity of small businesses in Latin America is only one-sixth of that of large firms, while in rich countries the difference is only 2.4 times.12 Latin American politicians pay ritual homage to los pymes (small and medium enterprises). They shouldn’t.
Though there is much debate about the causes of informality and the stunting of business in Latin America, the region’s heavy burden of regulation stands out.
Latin America invests only around 3 per cent of its GDP in infrastructure, while India manages 6 per cent, according to CAF,
Science without Borders programme, under which 100,000 Brazilian science students went abroad for a year, was a pioneering attempt to connect the country with international centres of knowledge.
Agriculture is the prime example: the world will continue to demand more food. Latin America has the land, sunshine and water to produce it in abundance.
To grow at around 5 per cent a year, the region needs to invest about 26 per cent of GDP, rather than its current average of 21 per cent.
Latin America’s reliance on foreign capital has contributed to the tendency of its currencies to appreciate in ways that have made even otherwise competitive businesses vulnerable to Chinese competition.
That debate is sterile, passé and damaging.
clientelist populism, mixed with a vestigial Leninism,
It is clear that Latin America needs more competitive market economies and a more effective state – one that is capable of fostering economic innovation and the development of human capital, while also offering citizens greater equality and security. To get there requires a
Latin America needs consensus-building, with the state, the private sector and civil society working together to set medium-term goals and hold governments accountable for them.
The benefits of economic openness are clear, but the politicians must ensure that they reach the hinterland.
Since the 1980s, democratic governments in Latin America have solved several big problems.
inflation,
cut the armed forces down to size and trained them in a new democratic role.
extreme inequality, widespread poverty, chaotic urbanisation and educational neglect.
much of the left forgot the abiding lessons of the end of the Cold War: that central planning had failed and that communism was tyranny, not liberation.
Largely overlooked by the outside world, Latin America has made much progress in the past few decades. A sense of perspective is important: three generations ago, most Latin Americans lived in semi-feudal conditions in the countryside; less than two generations ago, many were being murdered because of their political beliefs. This is not an argument for complacency in the face of Latin America’s relative failures of development and the flaws of its democracies. Rather, it is to say that the relatively disappointing record of many of Latin America’s democratic governments should be judged
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In an influential essay, Jorge Castañeda, a Mexican academic and former foreign minister, talked of ‘the two lefts’: ‘One is modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist, and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard-core left of the past. The other, born of the great tradition of Latin American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded. The first is well aware of its past mistakes (as well as those of its erstwhile role models in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and has changed accordingly. The second, unfortunately, has not.’
Populism
Populism first surfaced as a political term in nineteenth-century Russia, denoting middle-class intellectuals who embraced peasant communalism as an antidote to Western liberalism. In the United States, too, populism was a rural movement, reaching its zenith in the 1896 presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan against the gold standard.
France did not recognise Haiti’s independence until 1825, and then only after the new state agreed to pay reparations of 150 million francs (later reduced to 60 million); Haiti did not repay the resulting debt until 1922. In January 2004, Haiti’s government commemorated the bicentenary of independence. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was to be overthrown shortly afterwards, used the occasion to demand that France repay the reparations, which with interest, he said, amounted to $21.7 billion. 9.Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions,
Panama was a province of Colombia until 1903, when it declared independence in a rebellion inspired by the United States.
Costa Rica had few Indians and, as a result, land was distributed more evenly, rural wages were higher and there were few haciendas. Although the franchise was limited, Costa Rica’s coffee-growing elite laid the basis of universal education and a civilian political system in the late nineteenth century.
Quoted in Stephen M. Streeter, ‘Interpreting the 1954 US intervention in Guatemala: Realist, revisionist and postrevisionist perspectives’, The History Teacher, 34:1 (2000). In 1972, United Fruit sold its remaining interests in Guatemala to Del Monte. United Fruit changed its name to Chiquita Brands in 1989. Chiquita attracted controversy for paying Colombian paramilitaries in 1997–2004; while it admitted the payments, it said they were extorted. In 2014, Chiquita was sold to a Brazilian consortium.
granted the United States an indefinite lease for a base for ‘coaling and naval purposes’ only at Guantánamo Bay. The lease can only be terminated if both countries agree. Cuba claims that it is illegal, and since 1959 has refused to cash the cheque for $4,000 in annual rent offered by the United States. See Julia Sweig, Cuba: What
threat to the revolution. But his anti-Americanism may have been given an edge by the Eisenhower administration’s support for Batista. Szulc cites a letter from Fidel to Celia Sánchez, his companion, written on 5 June 1958, shortly after a rebel position had been bombed by Batista’s air force using US-supplied bombs: ‘I have sworn that the Americans will pay very dearly for what they are doing. When this war has ended, a much bigger and greater war will start for me, a war I shall launch against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny’
December 2016, the priority exchange rate was 10 bolívares to the dollar; the black-market rate began 2016 at 833 to the dollar, and ended it at 3,165 to the dollar, according to DolarToday,
wealthy build their own oasis’, Financial Times,
‘Venezuela 2016 inflation hits 800 percent, GDP shrinks 19 percent: document’, Reuters, 20 January 2017. 71.Credit
‘Infant mortality soars in Venezuela’,
Much of the political science literature on Brazil published in the second half of the 1990s, especially in the United States, was deeply pessimistic, even as the country’s prospects were being transformed. That was because it was based on fieldwork conducted during the 1980s or early 1990s.
Dirceu was among 25 politicians and officials eventually convicted of crimes including embezzlement, corruption and misuse of public funds by the Supreme Court in 2012. Dirceu and some of the others were jailed a year
See ‘The United States and Venezuela: Tales from a failed coup’, The Economist, 25 April 2002. A State Department spokesman denied the allegations of American involvement in the coup in a letter (‘Events in Venezuela’) published in The Economist, 16 May 2002. Otto Reich, the assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, was reported by the New York Times to have summoned several Latin American ambassadors to his office to urge them to support the change of government. William Finnegan, ‘Castro’s Shadow: America’s man in Latin America and his obsession’, The New Yorker, 14 and 21
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‘The loneliness of Latin America’ was the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s acceptance speech on being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. 2.Michael Reid, ‘Nervous Mexico prepares to wed
Biden, Joseph R. Jnr, ‘Building on success: Opportunities for the next administration’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2016 Biglaiser, Glen, Guardians of the Nation? Economists, generals
