I thought you were saying something about closeness to geographical borders or the like. You did not answer whether you consider Latin American capitalism to have failed by your metric. Half way between communism and “real” capitalism (which would seem to include e. g. France, Italy and Sweden)? That sounds like a post hoc justification. (I’m assuming you are not talking about soviet aligned governments, which controlled only a small fraction of the total Latin American economy over the time frame in question)
I couldn’t find anything for 1989, but check the economic freedom ratings of the Heritage Foundation for 1995: The variation among Western European and Latin American nations is much greater than the difference between their averages and most Latin American nations are within the Western European range. The reason the Latin American nations score a bit lower on average is mostly corruption and they score “better” on government spending.
I don’t know much about the specifics of Latin American countries, just that has a lot of revolutions that involve socialist governments taking power, which justifies not labeling them as capitalist to the extent that the canonical cases are.
Where except Cuba and Nicaragua did communist or socialist governments try to and manage to stay in power long enough to make significant headway in establishing a socialist economy, rather than being disposed by US -backed coups?
Long story short, I don’t know enough about Latin America to know whether it’s strong contrary evidence, but what I’ve seen suggests it’s not. I will say, though, that most of these cases of a US-backed “capitalist” regime taking over after a communist revolution are really just changes in names. For example, Reagan backed Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire as an “anti-communist stalwart”, even though his regime was about as far from a market economy as you could get!
However, most of Latin America was run by explicitly socialist, Marxist-influenced regimes, which was why Pinochet’s rebelling against one (and yes it was murderous and horrifying, I won’t defend that) and setting up an actual pro-market economy was such an anomaly.
However, most of Latin America was run by explicitly socialist, Marxist-influenced regimes
Are you talking about parties that have the word “socialist” in their name or are members of the Socialist International like the Parti Socialiste in France, or about parties that tried to transition to a socialist economy? Those are very different things! The first would probably be closer to true for Western Europe (I can’t think of a Western European nation that hasn’t been ruled by a Socialist International member party, though conservative parties generally ruled longer) and the second just isn’t true at all.
I thought you were saying something about closeness to geographical borders or the like. You did not answer whether you consider Latin American capitalism to have failed by your metric. Half way between communism and “real” capitalism (which would seem to include e. g. France, Italy and Sweden)? That sounds like a post hoc justification. (I’m assuming you are not talking about soviet aligned governments, which controlled only a small fraction of the total Latin American economy over the time frame in question)
I couldn’t find anything for 1989, but check the economic freedom ratings of the Heritage Foundation for 1995: The variation among Western European and Latin American nations is much greater than the difference between their averages and most Latin American nations are within the Western European range. The reason the Latin American nations score a bit lower on average is mostly corruption and they score “better” on government spending.
I don’t know much about the specifics of Latin American countries, just that has a lot of revolutions that involve socialist governments taking power, which justifies not labeling them as capitalist to the extent that the canonical cases are.
Where except Cuba and Nicaragua did communist or socialist governments try to and manage to stay in power long enough to make significant headway in establishing a socialist economy, rather than being disposed by US -backed coups?
Long story short, I don’t know enough about Latin America to know whether it’s strong contrary evidence, but what I’ve seen suggests it’s not. I will say, though, that most of these cases of a US-backed “capitalist” regime taking over after a communist revolution are really just changes in names. For example, Reagan backed Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire as an “anti-communist stalwart”, even though his regime was about as far from a market economy as you could get!
However, most of Latin America was run by explicitly socialist, Marxist-influenced regimes, which was why Pinochet’s rebelling against one (and yes it was murderous and horrifying, I won’t defend that) and setting up an actual pro-market economy was such an anomaly.
Are you talking about parties that have the word “socialist” in their name or are members of the Socialist International like the Parti Socialiste in France, or about parties that tried to transition to a socialist economy? Those are very different things! The first would probably be closer to true for Western Europe (I can’t think of a Western European nation that hasn’t been ruled by a Socialist International member party, though conservative parties generally ruled longer) and the second just isn’t true at all.