Brazil Surpasses Chile as the New Model Latin America Economy; Lula Leverages “Most Popular Politician on Earth” Label
January 18th, 2010SOURCE: CHRISTIANSCIENCEMONITOR
For two decades, Chile was the “teacher’s pet” of Latin America, the student who always brought home straight A’s. Economists gushed that the Andean country’s commitment to free-market policies and democratic reform made it a model for the developing world. And as Chileans enjoyed the trappings of a sustained average growth rate of more than 5 percent per year, poverty plummeted from 40 percent to 13.7 percent. But in the past year, Chile’s gold star has gone to its hulking neighbor to the east, Brazil.
The agricultural juggernaut just won its bid to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics; it discovered vast oil deposits that could turn it into a major oil exporter; it was one of the last countries to be pulled into the global economic crisis and one of the first to pull out.
To be sure, the so-called Chilean “miracle” that constructed the most …
