What Makes Chilean Agriculture Tick? Estimation and Interpretation of Elasticities in Representative Markets
The Chilean countryside has experienced dramatic change in the last 20 years. From the mid-1960s onwards successive governments implemented increasingly radical land reforms. This process was stopped by the 1973 military coup, after which some land was returned to the original owners and most of it distributed in individual parcels. Later on some concentration occurred, resulting mainly from small farmers being forced to sell by lack of credit and technical support. But the age-old traditional large estates (described by some authors as pre-capitalist latifundia or haciendas) were not reestablished; instead new family-sized and modern capitalist farms developed. At the same time, the post-1973 macroeconomic policies liberalised external trade and domestic prices, and agricultural exports and imports rose. The traditional patterns of land exploitation, labour use and rural-urban migration all experienced substantive change (Rivera and Cruz, 1984; Kay, 1985).
Employment- and earnings-generating potential of the neo-liberal model.
This chapter examines two of the most frequent objections raised to the operation of the neo-liberal model in rural areas. They are, first, that despite some economic successes, the social costs in terms of stagnant employment and earnings are high: benefits would not ‘trickle down’ to the poor. The second criticism is that the most dynamic agricultural activities (such as fruit exports) are likely to lose most of their competitive edge in international markets, as labour scarcity during the harvest becomes increasingly more generalised. Whatever the actual merits — or lack of them — of each one of these arguments (something which is examined in the following pages), they are mutually incompatible. If no amount of agricultural expansion along neo-liberal lines is likely to increase rural employment or improve earnings prospects, then any fears or expectations of labour scarcity are totally unjustified. On the other hand, should labour scarcity ever develop, by definition rural unemployment would decline and possibly, but not inevitably, earnings would improve as a result.
On the Role of Professional Sports in the National Economy Under the Market Economy Conditions
Through the research of the present situations of the professional sports at home and abroad and its influence on economy, this paper points out the opportunities, challenges and the exist- ing main problems that the professional sports faces in the transitional peried-from plan economy to market economy, then elucidates that the professional sports can becompletely developed and improved and play an important role in the national economy under the market economy conditions.