Political Economy of Peripheral Growth

This book provides a political economy perspective on Chile's contemporary economic development, explaining the different stages of Chile's neoliberal pattern of economic integration into the global economy from 1973 to 2015. Three key explanatory variables are considered, one nation-centred and two international-centred: the evolution of business-state relations (which branch of the business class was most influential in the policymaking), US geopolitical interest in the region through the waves of trade agreements, and the political impact of the dynamics of inflows and outflows of financial capital on Latin America in general, and Chile in particular. Ahumada proposes that through the interaction of these elements it is possible to understand not only Chile's pattern of economic integration but, perhaps most importantly, its contemporary economic dilemmas: export reprimarisation and premature deindustrialisation. Indeed, even though Chile is typically considered to be a successful case of a free market economy, this book presents an alternative narrative of Chile's growth through using a Latin American Structuralist political economy perspective. While it recognises the positive results in terms of growth, it also emphasises the lack of dynamic sources for long-term development, which embeds the economy into short-term booms followed by periods of stagnation. Furthermore, unlike other works that have taken the conventional neoclassical approach of an exclusive economic analysis of Chile's economic integration, this book focuses on Chile's inner political economy, its interaction with the international context and its critical conjuncture-path dependence dynamics.