steinrokkan posted:

The contrast between Latin America and Eastern Europe, including Turkey, is quite illustrative of the main problem facing these countries, I think. Eastern Europe has been doing really well, almost invariably, since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and especially since the beginning of their EEC association. Latin America in contrast has been generally struggling, for decades, to get out of stagnation.

There are some apparent possible causes, like different structural paths of development, but the truth is that even countries that didn't rely on e.g. the structural shortcut (i.e. skipping to a service economy without having prior extensive industrial economy), that is mostly countries influenced by the doctrine of Latin American structuralism (Celso Furtado etc.), and which as a result followed a path similar to that of Eastern European countries before the 1990s (national interventionism in preferred industries with little focus on securing foreign investments and emphasis on income distribution), saw themselves falling into one crisis after another. So what is the key difference between the winners and losers in this middle income category?

I'd argue it's a systematic predisposition for protectionism in the Latin American countries, borne arguably out of the structuralist legacy and intrenched in institutional path dependency, vs. dedication to open markets in Eastern Europe, Turkey etc., even if such dedication had to be enforced from above, by intergovernmental and supranational processes.