|
Indocentric view |
|
Home | About us | Contact Us | Subscribe | FAQs |
|
Foreign Policy: A Middle Power Role for Chile Abdul Nafey
Chile is honing its foreign policy to play the role of catalyst for regional integration and Latin America’s integration with the rest of the world. For Chile, the term ‘region’ means the whole of Latin America and not just South America. Chile being a middle power, it is in its perceived ‘national interest’ to work for rule-based multilateralism at the regional and international levels. The current Chilean diplomacy is to respect ‘unity within diversity’ i.e. that varied developmental experiments, leadership styles and integration processes should not mar regional cooperation. It is the imperative of collective regional development that is driving Bachelet’s foreign policy towards neighbourhood, focussing on mutual confidence building measures and cooperation in the areas of economic exchanges, ‘new migration’ and energy and infrastructure development. The logic of ‘open’ regionalism, however, makes Chile look beyond integration within South America. At the Hemispheric level, Chile has come to characterise the ‘third way’ of development, which has avoided both the recklessness of free-marketeerism and the hallowed promise of ‘21st century socialisms.’ Domestic imperatives of sustaining a high economic growth rate, inclusive development and social cohesion, and embedding democratic practices by gradually weaning out authoritarian legacies are reinforcing Chile’s middle power Liberal Internationalism under Bachelet. From around the mid-1990s, Chile began paying attention to the Asia-Pacific region, positioning itself as a bridge for Asian expansion into Latin America.
Chile’s Economic Transformation: Muddle or Model? R. Narayanan
Over the last four decades, Chile has evolved from a slow-growing state-directed economy into a fast-growing market-oriented one, attesting to its success in implementing comprehensive neo-liberal economic reforms. At least three policy conclusions emerge from the delineation of Chile’s economic transformation trajectory. First, what distinguishes Chile from the rest of the similarly placed countries in the region and elsewhere is that it had a head start in the reform process. Chile’s reform process in the incipient first generation phase essentially comprised fiscal stability, trade liberalisation and inflation control. Second, Chile followed up the completion of the first generation of reforms with the second generation of reforms. It intensified the process and brought to the fore institutional innovations, including, among others, the pruning of supervisory and regulatory mechanisms and pension system reform. The third distinguishing feature of the Chilean experience is the importance that was attached to other institutions – rule of law, legal mechanisms to eliminate corruption, effectiveness of government and, above all, political stability following the transition from military rule to civil administration. Yet, in reviewing Chile’s transformation, a residual question still remains unanswered: Are macroeconomic success and distributional equity mutually exclusive? Recent discourse underlines the need for good governance based on principles of rule of law, rights protection and regulatory frameworks that guarantee fair market competition and adequate checks and balances. These in turn lead to either better economic policies or better outcomes for the same set of policies. On both fronts, Chile seems to have made modest progress.
Chile’s International Trade Policy Jorge Heine
Many attribute the enormous success of the Chilean economy – the best performing in the world outside Asia since 1990, with an average growth rate of 5.5% a year, and now invited to join the OECD, which it is expected to do later this year – to the market access FTAs have gained for Chilean exports. Chile has crafted its own approach to its development needs rather than picking ready-made “off-the-shelf” solutions. An incrementalist, iterative approach like the one followed by Chile, in terms of FTAs and its international trade policy more generally, has been shown to be a fruitful way of gaining market access and fostering domestic growth, whatever its theoretical shortcomings. During this decade Chile’s attention has been turned towards South Asia, especially India. Contrary to what many skeptics thought, the Chile-India PTA has been a win-win deal. Yet, its limited nature means that its expansion into a full-fledged FTA would be a welcome step.
“TIGER MEETS JAGUAR” Chilean Policy towards the Asia-Pacific Region Manfred Wilhelmy
There is a broad consensus in Chile that the Asia-Pacific region has become a key geographic, economic and political area of focus within our foreign relations. Since the term of President Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994), Chilean diplomacy in the Pacific has stressed the political factors of stability, rule of law, resilience of public institutions and a low level of corruption in supporting Chile’s aspiration to be seen as a suitable Latin American partner of East Asian powers. Chile’s choice of the bilateral approach has led to the conclusion of free trade (or preferential trade) agreements with 56 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Vis-à-vis the major East Asian economies, Chile looks like an ASEAN country located on the other side of the world i.e. Chile’s position recalls the “ASEAN+3” or “ASEAN+1+1+1” formula. However, Chile’s relations with the Asia-Pacific region are affected by the so-called “tyranny of distance” and the Chilean presence is still minimal in many countries. The task of building a “country image” is the big challenge that has now begun to be tackled.
Economic Relations with Asia and the Need for Strategic Partnership with India Prof. Yun-Tso Lee
The present paper advances two hypotheses. Firstly, the emerging economies of Asia, which share the same principles, are in for long-term engagement and deepening of ties by Chile. Secondly, since the inception of the twenty-first century, Chile has turned towards South Asia too, especially towards India which has been named the “next frontier” of Chilean economic foreign policy. In the past seven years, as many as nine agreements have been signed between the two countries thanks to a major strengthening of bilateral relations in diverse areas. Chile and India have lots of economic complementarities that can be usefully exploited and augmented to meet the needs of their burgeoning consumer bases. Chile is a strategic market for several Indian products and enjoys an excellent country image. Academic analysts in Chile hold the view that it is time to work out a strategic partnership through a bilateral free trade agreement and through greater cooperation in the areas of education and culture. In order to intensify the strategic partnership, it is proposed here that Chile should promote an integral, comprehensive and coherent strategy that would allow it to reinforce mutual economic and social benefits, and deepen political and institutional ties, so that Chile eventually becomes the platform for India’s entry into the rest of Latin America.
Partial Scope Agreement between Chile and India: An Assessment Sebastián Dávalos Bachelet & Yun-Tso Lee
The main objectives of the Partial Scope Agreement between Chile and India are to promote, by means of trade expansion, the harmonious development of economic relations between Chile and India, provide conditions for fair competitiveness in Chilean-Indian trade, take into consideration the principle of reciprocity in the implementation of the agreement and thus, by means of the removal of obstacles to trade, contribute to the development and harmonious expansion of international trade. The new objective of Chilean commercial policy was to create trade ties with complementary economies and diversify the destination of national exports. India represents an attractive destination not only for exports but also for foreign investment. The trade balance is favourable to Chile; besides, given the fact that the two countries have complementary economies, there is enormous potential for growth thanks to the agreement. The negotiation of an FTA between Chile and India seems to be the perfect tool to deepen the current economic relationship. It is time to consolidate Chile as a platform of investments and entrance of Asia into Latin America.
Towards Social Change: Chile’s Innovative Approaches and Strategies Priti Singh
Chile’s progress during the last two decades in evolving an appropriate policy framework and needed institutional changes, all with a view to accelerate growth and at the same time reap the benefits from the ongoing globalisation process have been remarkable. Even more important, what distinguishes Chile from other developing countries is its initiation since 1990 under the aegis of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia governments a new set of policy measures based on innovative strategies to deal with critical societal issues such as abject poverty, income inequality and social exclusion.
Smithian and Schumpeterian Growth in Chile: Entrepreneurship Revisited Prof. Juan Pablo Couyoumdjian
During the mid-1970s, Chile started a process of radical reforms that laid the foundations of a free-market economy in the country. Openness to foreign trade has usually been identified as a crucial element of these reforms. But one should also keep in mind that these reforms had an important institutional basis. In Chile, the institutions of a free-market economy have fostered the development of human ingenuity and resourcefulness, in short, of an entrepreneurial spirit, which has led to high economic growth in the last two decades or so. However, some setbacks have occurred and several weaknesses that affect the development of entrepreneurship still exist in the country. These issues may have led to a deceleration of the rate of economic growth in the country in the last decade. Thus, these factors represent the main challenges the Chilean economy will face in the next few years.
Democracy and Equity in Chile Satya R. Pattnayak
The effectiveness of the Chilean transition from dictatorship to democracy has been widely studied. Critics generally cite the undue influence of the Chilean military in the formative years of the Concertación and the successive civilian government’s unwillingness or inability to deal with the issues of human rights violations and abuses,besides the perennial problem of redistribution, both of which were left unattended during the military dictatorship. But as sympathizers point out, the first two presidencies of Patricio Aylwin and Eduardo Frei had to deal with the presence of many authoritarian features within the state apparatus, which reduced their effectiveness. For example, the unusually high number of appointtee senators in the Senate acted as a regular stumbling bloc to many of the proposed progressive legislations by the civilian governments. These included initiatives to ensure a greater redistribution of income and participation by organized labor. Understandably, therefore, the first two governments after 1989 adopted a more cautious approach to achieving the goals of redistribution.
Chile and Chindia Vishnu Priya
Scholarly analyses explain the economic growth of Latin American-Caribbean (LAC) region over the past 7-8 years largely in terms of the rising consumption of regional exports by the world’s two fastest growing economies namely, China and India. In particular, resource export economies of LAC region have benefited rather well from Asia’s economic dynamism; others, with capability to export light manufactures and value-added products have not fared bad either. Significantly, the rise in Latin American imports from Asia is also, by and large, accounted for by China and India. Given the evolving pattern and flow of assistance and investment from China and India, scholars are interpreting the development as marking a structural shift in Latin America’s traditionally closer ties with US and Europe. Asia, more precisely China and India, have arrived and this may have long-term implications for development and democracy in the LAC region.
|
