Unnamed: 0
int64 0
1.66k
| text
stringlengths 76
552
|
|---|---|
1,200 | <s>[INST] Structural adjustment, a phrase that strikes [/INST] terror in politicians' hearts all over the world, has followed stabilisation. </s> |
1,201 | <s>[INST] Budgets have been balanced, workers sacked, [/INST] markets liberalised; regulations have been scrapped and state companies sold off. </s> |
1,202 | <s>[INST] Tariffs and quotas are pass; free [/INST] trade all round is the order of the day. </s> |
1,203 | <s>[INST] Whether long-haired and wild in appearance, like Hernan Buchi in Chile, or [/INST] sober and respectable, like Pedro Aspe in Mexico, the reforming finance ministers have tended to be young, American-trained and highly capable. </s> |
1,204 | <s>[INST] The half-dozen men running Mexico are nearly [/INST] all American-educated, usually in economics, intellectually sharp and in their 40s. </s> |
1,205 | <s>[INST] Their Colombian counterparts, known [/INST] as the Kinder cabinet, are even younger. </s> |
1,206 | <s>[INST] An equally impressive team can be [/INST] found in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. </s> |
1,207 | <s>[INST] Last year Chile grew by [/INST] 10.4%, Argentina by 9%, Venezuela by 7%. </s> |
1,208 | <s>[INST] Inflation will be below 10% in Bolivia [/INST] and Mexico this year and heading that way in Costa Rica. </s> |
1,209 | <s>[INST] Argentina sold 45% of its [/INST] oil company YPF in June for $3 billion. </s> |
1,210 | <s>[INST] In 1989-92 Mexico attracted more than $35 [/INST] billion in foreign investment-enough to make poor Boris Yeltsin viridian with envy. </s> |
1,211 | <s>[INST] In short, Latin America seems destined at last to [/INST] become a serious place, where responsible politicians, not beribboned generals, run functioning democracies and prosperous economies. </s> |
1,212 | <s>[INST] It is almost as though the entire region is going through a change analogous [/INST] to one it went through in the 19th century, when church and state were painfully separated; only this time the separation is between economy and state. </s> |
1,213 | <s>[INST] Some countries, such as Chile, which has been leading the [/INST] pack since the mid 1970s, have been reforming for several years; others, such as Ecuador, have only just started. </s> |
1,214 | <s>[INST] Yet everywhere the intention seems to [/INST] be to continue with reform, not to turn back. </s> |
1,215 | <s>[INST] Outsiders have entertained high hopes of [/INST] Latin America before, and lived to see them dashed. </s> |
1,216 | <s>[INST] Argentines must weary of being reminded that at the beginning of [/INST] this century they were among the world's richest people; indeed between 1870 and 1930 they had Latin America's most successful economy. </s> |
1,217 | <s>[INST] In the following 60 years [/INST] they sank as inexorably as they had risen. </s> |
1,218 | <s>[INST] Mexico too, another showcase of reform, has gone through great economic [/INST] changes at the end of each of the past two centuries; on each occasion turbulence, indeed war, has ensued. </s> |
1,219 | <s>[INST] You do not have to be a [/INST] pessimist to see that all is not rosy in Latin America. </s> |
1,220 | <s>[INST] In general the race to make money is only just [/INST] outdoing the race to make babies: income per head for the region grew at about 0.5% last year. </s> |
1,221 | <s>[INST] That figure would have been higher but for Brazil, where [/INST] economic growth was negative in 1992 and where inflation is still running at about 30% a month. </s> |
1,222 | <s>[INST] Until it does, it will be [/INST] impossible to be optimistic for the region as a whole. </s> |
1,223 | <s>[INST] Peru's economy shrank in 1992, [/INST] for the fourth year out of five. </s> |
1,224 | <s>[INST] In better-run Colombia, the [/INST] annual rate of inflation is about 20%. </s> |
1,225 | <s>[INST] Many countries' exchange rates, borne up by [/INST] high interest rates and sound fiscal policies, are appreciation-to the alarm of exporters. </s> |
1,226 | <s>[INST] The region's stockmarkets, whose buoyancy is often touted as a measure of Latin America's new vigour, may [/INST] well be just as vulnerable to collapse as they were in the early 1980s, when those of Argentina and Chile, puffed up by capital inflows, rose beguilingly, only to deflate like failed souffl. </s> |
1,227 | <s>[INST] On several stockmarkets, including those of Argentina, Chile, [/INST] Colombia and Venezuela, fewer companies were listed in 1990 than ten years earlier. </s> |
1,228 | <s>[INST] The voters have lived with it for several years; they [/INST] have tightened their belts, and tightened them again, and now they want to let them out a bit. </s> |
1,229 | <s>[INST] If reform is so good, they [/INST] ask, why do a third of Latin Americans live in poverty? </s> |
1,230 | <s>[INST] Though average incomes per head are well above $2,000, millions of [/INST] people-in the Altiplano of Bolivia, central Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru and northeast Brazil-are no better off than sub-Saharan Africans. </s> |
1,231 | <s>[INST] Even in model Mexico, a little under [/INST] a quarter of the population (or 17m people) lives in absolute poverty. </s> |
1,232 | <s>[INST] All told 70m Latin Americans survive [/INST] on an income of less than $1 a day. </s> |
1,233 | <s>[INST] The pressure for social spending, on [/INST] health, education, housing and so on, is already building. </s> |
1,234 | <s>[INST] Elections, either presidential or congressional or both, will be held next month [/INST] in Chile and Venezuela, next year in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Mexico and Uruguay. </s> |
1,235 | <s>[INST] In the end, the success or [/INST] failure of this bout of reform depends on Latin Americans. </s> |
1,236 | <s>[INST] Are they really determined this [/INST] time to become mature and responsible countries? </s> |
1,237 | <s>[INST] Or have they done no more than what they had [/INST] to do to survive, under the tutelage of the IF and World Bank, before reverting to type? </s> |
1,238 | <s>[INST] Are they, in other words, [/INST] still just a bunch of manana republics? </s> |
1,239 | <s>[INST] The rest of this survey [/INST] will assess the prospects for enduring reform. </s> |
1,240 | <s>[INST] ___ Document 171 of 400 Commitment, competence and [/INST] consensus Author: Grimond, John Publication info: The Economist 329.7837 (Nov 13, 1993): Survey 12,14+. </s> |
1,241 | <s>[INST] accountid=28034 Abstract: After examining several Latin American [/INST] countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela, a pattern begins to emerge. </s> |
1,242 | <s>[INST] Reform will prosper if a country has people at the top committed to it, other people [/INST] technically qualified to implement it, and a national trauma, such as hyper-inflation, that lives on in the memory of the voters as a horror to which they never wish to return. </s> |
1,243 | <s>[INST] Full text: Fortunately, Chile is not [/INST] the only country in Latin America to have transformed its economy. </s> |
1,244 | <s>[INST] Two of its neighbours, Argentina and Bolivia, have pulled [/INST] off a similar feat and, despite their very different circumstances, have done so as democracies. </s> |
1,245 | <s>[INST] The first is that it [/INST] helps to have had a vigorous attack of hyperinflation. </s> |
1,246 | <s>[INST] In this context inflation can be considered "hyper" when it [/INST] makes no sense for shopkeepers to open their doors for trading: their stock is more valuable unsold than sold. </s> |
1,247 | <s>[INST] Bolivia reached this state [/INST] in 1985, and Argentina four years later. </s> |
1,248 | <s>[INST] Inflation does strange things [/INST] not just to economies but to societies. </s> |
1,249 | <s>[INST] In Germany, where it helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler 60 years ago, its [/INST] effects are still felt today: modern Germans see a strong currency, sound in purchasing power, as virtually equivalent to a strong country, sound in political and economic health. </s> |
1,250 | <s>[INST] Inflation hits those with savings, [/INST] those with pensions, those with fixed incomes. </s> |
1,251 | <s>[INST] At the same time it [/INST] destroys all confidence in the economic system. </s> |
1,252 | <s>[INST] Latin American peasants do not [/INST] need Chicago School economists to tell them this. </s> |
1,253 | <s>[INST] The rich maybe able to survive rising prices; they can [/INST] send their saving abroad and even, if they are clever, devise schemes to make money out of inflation. </s> |
1,254 | <s>[INST] Governments may also benefit; if they can finance their activities by printing money, and see the [/INST] purchasing power of all those holding money diminish, they are in effect levying an inflation tax (which reached 21% of Bolivia's GDP in 1984 and 10% of Argentina's in 1989). </s> |
1,255 | <s>[INST] That is the main reason that Argentina and Bolivia managed, in the 1980s, to put in place [/INST] programmes that would be unthinkable in most democracies in ordinary circumstances (Argentina's economy contracted by 6.3% in 1989; Bolivia, whose population was barely 7m, laid off 28,000 tin miners in 1985). </s> |
1,256 | <s>[INST] True, in Argentina they did [/INST] not vote for it, they voted for Peronism. </s> |
1,257 | <s>[INST] But it is a measure of President Menem's skill as a politician that [/INST] he realised his only hope of popularity (and of possible re-election, unconstitutional though that remains) was to smite inflation and put stability in its place. </s> |
1,258 | <s>[INST] In Bolivia, this achievement, now eight [/INST] years old, is just enough to satisfy the voters. </s> |
1,259 | <s>[INST] They want economic growth, but they show [/INST] no sins of wanting to o back to the old system. </s> |
1,260 | <s>[INST] This year they elected a government led by Gonzalo Sanchez [/INST] de Lozada, the man who, as minister of planning, was largely responsible for the austerity measures of the 1980s. </s> |
1,261 | <s>[INST] In last month's congressional elections in Argentina, the voters gave a huge [/INST] vote of confidence to the Peronists whose leader, one month after his election, so readily abandoned populism and embraced economic orthodoxy. </s> |
1,262 | <s>[INST] Despite differences between government and opposition, a consensus [/INST] over economic policy is taking shape in Argentina, just as it has in Chile. </s> |
1,263 | <s>[INST] All this should give comfort to those who [/INST] believe that change can be introduced in democracies, and that it can endure. </s> |
1,264 | <s>[INST] Domingo Cavallo, the Harvard-educated economy minister who has masterminded the Argentine reforms since [/INST] 1991, says military rule would make his task no easier; he relishes the democratic circumstances in which he has been obliged to work. </s> |
1,265 | <s>[INST] In Argentina, he argues, the army was never like the [/INST] Chilean one, whose members had always been professional, not hand in love with business and other vested interests. </s> |
1,266 | <s>[INST] Had the Argentine army stayed in government, he implies, it [/INST] would have been more interested in feathering its own nest than in allowing the economy to soar free. </s> |
1,267 | <s>[INST] Others point out that cosy relations [/INST] with businessmen were not the only signs of Argentina's soldiers. </s> |
1,268 | <s>[INST] The military governments in Argentina [/INST] and Bolivia had absolutely nothing to recommend them. </s> |
1,269 | <s>[INST] Whereas in Chile the soldiers at least brought economic reform, [/INST] and in Brazil industrialisation and economic growth, in Argentina and Bolivia they brought only poverty and slaughter. </s> |
1,270 | <s>[INST] To this day, on Thursday afternoons at 3.30, relations of some of the 10,000-20,000 Argentines who "disappeared" [/INST] during the years of military rule in the 1970s perambulate in a dignified circle round the Plaza de Mayo in the heart of Buenos Aires, commemorating the victims of the dirty war. </s> |
1,271 | <s>[INST] Still, if a dose of hyperinflation or a nasty military [/INST] government is all you need to reform a country, how come Nicaragua or Peru has not done better? </s> |
1,272 | <s>[INST] The people, given the chance in 1990, threw out the guerrilla-turned-civilian, [/INST] Daniel Ortega, just as the Chilean voters rejected General Pinochet in 1988 and the Bolivian rejected General Hugo Banzer this year. </s> |
1,273 | <s>[INST] Nicaragua however, had been a country with a civil war sponsored by the Soviet Union and the United States Though the [/INST] American-armed contras had been pushed to make peace with the Sandinists, and though the winner of the 1990 presidential election Violeta Chamorro, strove to accommodate her erstwhile opponents by bringing them into her government, no consensus yet exists in Nicaragua. </s> |
1,274 | <s>[INST] Much of the blame for this rests with the right But Sandinists have recently been implicated in number [/INST] of scandals from secreting arms to plotting kidnaps; their commitment to democracy has plainly not grown since their last days in power when they stole almost everything they could lay their hands on. </s> |
1,275 | <s>[INST] In spite of all this, some economic reforms have taken place: [/INST] inflation, though rising recently, has been down in single digits; the army has been cut from 80,000 to 16,000. </s> |
1,276 | <s>[INST] Peru never had especially nasty military governments; they tended rather to be well-intentioned, [/INST] and at least one, that of General Velasco Alvarado in 1968-75, was formed in order to speed up land reform and social change. </s> |
1,277 | <s>[INST] But Peru has something in [/INST] common with Nicaragua: political consensus has eluded it. </s> |
1,278 | <s>[INST] He has tried to put in place one of the toughest [/INST] stabilisation programmes in Latin America, perhaps the toughest yet has disdained to build a political base that could support it. </s> |
1,279 | <s>[INST] In this he has been a little like President Perez in Venezuela, another [/INST] politician set upon the right economic policies (and in Venezuela producing some impressive growth) while neglecting the necessity of keeping in touch with the people. </s> |
1,280 | <s>[INST] In Peru, however, Mr Fujimori has cosied up to the army, winning its support when he suspended the constitution [/INST] last year; in Venezuela discontented army officers twice came close to removing Mr Perez from office last year, and would probably by now have done so had he not been forced out in May through impeachment proceedings. </s> |
1,281 | <s>[INST] Reform will prosper if a country has (1) people at the top committed to it, (2) other [/INST] people technically qualified to implement it, (3) a national trauma, such as hyperinflation, that lives on in the memory of the voters as a horror to which they never wish to return. </s> |
1,282 | <s>[INST] Virtually all the countries of Latin America--with one [/INST] big exception, Brazil--satisfy the first condition, and an impressive number satisfy the second. </s> |
1,283 | <s>[INST] But the example of Colombia, which has never suffered either egreious [/INST] military rule or hyperinflation, and yet is carrying out a full-blooded reform programme, suggests that trauma is not necessary. </s> |
1,284 | <s>[INST] Colombia instead points to the necessity of [/INST] consensus about the need for change; this is really the third necessary condition. </s> |
1,285 | <s>[INST] It was imposed by force in [/INST] Chile, before it emerged more generally among the people. </s> |
1,286 | <s>[INST] Other governments that have not had the luxury of reform by military diktat [/INST] have nonetheless brought in changes without the full consent of their congresses, which often represent vested interests and venal beneficiaries of the unreformed system. </s> |
1,287 | <s>[INST] Decrees have been widely used in Argentina; much of Bolivia's reform programme was put in place during [/INST] a technical state of siege; Mr Fujimori suspended the Peruvian Congress, though he then went back to the people to seek their approval-and on October 31st they endorsed Peru's new constitution. </s> |
1,288 | <s>[INST] OIL AND VINEGAR But in a democracy consensus has to be [/INST] constantly nourished and invigorated, especially at the start before reform has been shown to work--otherwise the voters' tolerance may disappear. </s> |
1,289 | <s>[INST] That is why the combination of Mr Cavallo and Mr Menem has been so effective [/INST] in Argentina: a technocratic economy minister devises and implements the policy, inspiring confidence among educated critics both at home and abroad; a politician president sells it to the people. </s> |
1,290 | <s>[INST] Two years ago Brazil had the making of a similar team [/INST] in the shape of Marcilio Marques Moreira, an orthodox finance minister, and Fernando Collor, a president apparently committed to reform. </s> |
1,291 | <s>[INST] Mr Collor, caught with hand in till, was driven [/INST] from office last year having established a rapport neither with Congress nor with the people. </s> |
1,292 | <s>[INST] But the other half of the team [/INST] is missing: President Itamar Franco has no commitment to structural change. </s> |
1,293 | <s>[INST] In Peru Mr Fujimori lacks not only political credibility but also economic support; [/INST] when Carlos Boloa resigned as finance minister in January, the government lost a shrewd negotiator and one of Latin America's most respected young economists. </s> |
1,294 | <s>[INST] Even a committed and respected team [/INST] backed by consensual voters may, however, not be enough. </s> |
1,295 | <s>[INST] The obstacles to reform come in different guises in different countries: drugs in Bolivia, Peru [/INST] and Colombia; terrorism and insurgency in Pen, Colombia and parts of Central America; bizarre constitutions, corrupt politicians, ill-trained bureaucrats, watchful generals and extremes of wealth and poverty almost everywhere. </s> |
1,296 | <s>[INST] In Mexico, where economic reform has one further than anywhere but Chile, an [/INST] authoritarian political system is being asked to make an upheaval-free transition to democracy, a feat that has eluded richer countries (such as Russia). </s> |
1,297 | <s>[INST] This survey will now look [/INST] at these hazards on the road ahead. </s> |
1,298 | <s>[INST] Is it correct to dismiss Brazil's current path as a mistaken one, or [/INST] does Brazil show that there is another route to democratic prosperity, different from the one that almost all the Spanish speaking countries are following? </s> |
1,299 | <s>[INST] ___ Document 181 of 400 Argentina: Menem wants [/INST] a second term Author: Anonymous Publication info: The Economist 329.7831 (Oct 2, 1993): 47. </s> |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.