Word: chile
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...informal sector in Chile includes occasional services such as cleaning cars, shining shoes, working as domestic servants and acting as street vendors. In Santi-ago, approximately 30 percent of workers were employed in the informal sector in 1989. In 1982, 37 percent of those entering the workforce found employment in the informal sector...
Such corruption may be terrible, but the abuse of private property which occurs when large segments of the economy are forced underground by mindless laws against entrepreneurship is the real scandal. Those working in the informal sector in Chile and Russia are aften the poorest of the poor...
Russia and Chile are thus depriving their lower classes a freedom essential to their own well-being and the well-being of their nations' economies as a whole. While Chile's corporatist capitalism allowed a flood of consumers goods to enter the country, putting all its eggs in the big business basket made Chile extremely vulnerable to the recession of the early 1980s...
Russia seems to be taking a similar corporatist tack in its free market reforms. As it ignores the needs of small businesses and entrepeneurs, the government is concentrating on converting large military industries to consumer production. Like Chile, Russia will ultimately find this corporatist strategy increases the wealth of its citizens only marginally. The most wealthy members of society will benefit, and some industrial workers will retain their jobs. But the economy as a whole will gain little if the entrepeneurial base remains marginalized...
...CALL CHILE and Russia "capitalist" or "free market" in their reforms ignores the market that really matters. If Russia wants to emulate the economic successes of the United States (or even of Rumania) it should move away from the Chilean corporatist model. The free market, to function well, must be free for all, not just for a select few big businesses chosen at random by bribed bureaucrats...