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Some interesting points made here- and a few that come to mind:
1) The thread languished for over three years but has been revitalised.
2) Chile has a per capita GDP slightly higher even than that of Argentina in spite of having faced many similar problems, an economy over-dependent on copper, political instability, Allende nationalizing assets of foreign countries, particularly the U.S.
3) The three largest economies in South America are still the ABC, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia.
4) Latin America over the last several years has shown much stronger growth than the Eurozone: Portugal, Greece and Spain being especially disastrous.
5) Christina Fernandez de Kirchner has been President of Argentina for 7 years, and appears to have broad popular support. Will this period of political stability help the economy to recover?
Something that might be worth speculation/discussion- can national pride influence a nations development? For example the US putting a man on the moon in 1969, the growth of electronics and car industries in Japan in the 1980's?
If so I would argue that Brazil takes pride in hosting the World Cup of soccer and in 2016 the Olympics, and this may give the country an economic boost.
No doubt political stability, fiscal policies and concentration of wealth, investment in education and capital equipment as well as diversification of economy all play roles in economic development- I am not convinced by the paper linked earlier that concentration of population around the new capital of Brasilia was a factor.
Sorry- a further thought.
The economy of Uruguay, though much smaller because of the small population, had a similar dependence on the beef industry and was also vulnerable to commodity prices. In fact, Fray Bentos is the name of a corned beef product as well as a major city in Uruguay.
It has a per capita GDP about equal to that of Brazil without a car building industry or (until very recently) any oil or gas, but has recently diversified its economy by attracting a large call centre industry.
Argentina is much like most of South America. It is just difficult to do business internationally with many South American Countries. Wire tranfers are expensive and the 'trading across borders' index is very high for most all.
One of the reasons this decline happened was because of the small population, in my opinion.
Argentina received the second largest number of immigrants during 19th and 20th centuries(only behind the US), but still it wasn't enough. American and Argentinian populations were kind of similar in size before the immigration wave, but Argentina today has less than 50 million inhabitants, while the US has already reached 300 million.
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