Neostructuralism in Chile: a case study of outward orientation policy

Abstract

Since Chile's democracy was restored in 1990, the new government supported by an alliance called La Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (which was composed by four main political parties,) decided to deepen the free trade policy implemented by August Pinochet's regimen. They did the latter by mostly signing bilateral free-trade agreements (FTA) and preferential trade agreements (PTA). This international trade strategy has been called open regionalism and additive regionalism, and has been one of the most important policies that La Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia has implemented. In year 2000, a socialist named Ricardo Lagos was elected president of Chile. From the start this administration was considered to be in line with neostructuralism, a revised development theory of the old school of structuralism, which was elaborated in the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC). In this understanding, this thesis explores the development theory of neostructuralism (as well as its predecessor structuralism) and identifies a neostructural model of development in order to determine if Chile's outward orientation in the last 15 years has actually met the normative prescriptions of this model. The key finding of this thesis is that even though the neostructural model of development holds some descriptive and normative approximations to the social phenomena of Chile's international trade strategy, the actions triggered by this strategy have not yet achieved the most relevant objectives of the neostructural model.