Content area
Full text
Ffrench-Davis, Ricardo. Economie Reforms in Chile: From Dictatorship to Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Figures, tables, bibliography, notes, index, 263 pp.; hardcover $57.50.
Chile is often cited as an economic model for developing countries. For some observers, this status grows from its success in implementing comprehensive neoliberal economic reforms. For others, Chile is an example of what to avoid. Critics point to those very reforms as the root of a troubling trend toward increasing inequality in both distribution of wealth and access to social services. Often, scholarly treatments of Chile's reform process boil down to an ideologically charged dialogue between supporters and opponents of the Pinochet government.
Ricardo Ffrench-Davis avoids simplistic ideological analyses of the country's economic reforms and provides one of the best works exploring the multidimensionality of Chile's contemporary economic transformations. This book's abiding concern with issues of inequality and the political dimensions of economic reform also sets it apart from many recent analyses that are overly economistic and that focus excessively on Chile's macroeconomic performance. At the same time, the book recognizes that the inequality plaguing the country cannot be redressed without paying attention to macroeconomic results, and that equality can best be guaranteed through balanced and careful choices in the application of economic reform.
Ffrench-Davis's book is a compilation of 11 essays covering three analytical phases of economic reform in Chile. The author breaks the Pinochet government's reform process into two phases and explores the policies of postauthoritarian governments as the third. Ffrench-Davis builds on his long experience as a CIEPLAN economist and Chilean Central Bank official to provide a comprehensive collection of essays dealing with import liberalization, exchange rate policy, debt, income distribution, capital flows, and additional related issues. he caps off the work with a complete list of 10 challenges facing the Chilean economy for the next century.
Ffrench-Davis's work is valuable because it challenges widely held myths and explores new puzzles yet to be analyzed by students of economic reform in Chile. It does so while underscoring the consequences of economic policy for the lives of everyday Chileans and handily incorporating the political variables that affect the application and success of reforms.
The first myth that Ffrench-Davis challenges is the purported success of the so-called...