Eight Decades of Inflation in Chile, 1879-1959: A Political Interpretation

Davis, Tom E.

doi:10.1086/258786

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…38 In early 1946, Chile's Communist daily decried the actions of retailers and distributors for the scarcity of bread, tea, sugar, and cooking oil-just a handful of the more than 200 different products and services that filled state price control lists when the postwar era began. 39 In one particularly personal attack, Communist Party members alleged that speculation carried out by the shopkeeper father of Comisariato architect Juan Bautista Rossetti himself was responsible for sugar shortages in one downtown Santiago neighborhood. 40 In turn, boisterous consumer demonstrations demanded the state purge compromised price inspectors, prosecute suspected speculators to the fullest extent of the law, and establish a state-run distribution company that would channel essential goods to consumers through neighborhood "subsistence committees."…”

Section: Against Speculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monitor, Produce, Distribute: Chile’s Battle Against Inflation and Scarcity, 1932-1973

Frens-String

2023

Hist. Crit.

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Objective/Context: This article reconstructs the struggle that consumers and the state waged to contain inflation and consumer scarcity in mid-twentieth-century Chile. Methodology: Drawing on records from Chile's Ministry of Economy and print media, it first assesses how in the 1930s, mobilized consumers and Chile's national price control office worked together to create an expectation that a strong interventionist state could prevent inflation and shortages by monitoring and regulating the speculative behavior of private merchants. Then, by examining the writings of leading economic thinkers of the postwar era, it details how the state's understanding of rising prices and scarcity increasingly turned to structural matters of economic production and distribution, particularly in Chile's rural economy. Originality: While most scholarship on inflation and scarcity in twentieth-century Latin America tends to either focus on the intellectual debate surrounding shortages and price volatility or on the grassroots political experience with these problems, I show how interactions between consumers and the state created a paradox. On the one hand, consumers came to expect that the state had an immediate duty and capacity to minimize short-term economic hardship. But on the other hand, by continuing to identify inflation and scarcity as problems driven by individual acts, many consumers, including some of the political left, lost faith in the state's long-term planning capacity. Conclusions: The article concludes by showing how in the early 1970s, during a period of heightened class conflict, the state's embrace of a longer-term, structural approach to inflation and scarcity drove a wedge between Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular (up) government and its political base.

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Section: Against Speculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monitor, Produce, Distribute: Chile’s Battle Against Inflation and Scarcity, 1932-1973

Frens-String

2023

Hist. Crit.

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“…Chilean capitalists were reluctant to invest in an industrial economy in which the organized resistance of the working class made the profitability of investments uncertain, even in consumer markets virtually free of foreign competitors. Although the role the state came to play after 1939 is often linked ex post facto to an import-substitution approach, these policies were more a matter of the necessity to compensate for Chilean capitalists' weak urge to invest than of a coherent development strategy (Davis, 1963;Furtado, 1976).…”

Section: The Formation Of the State: Historical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tax exemptions and easy long-term credit, in reality at negative rates of interest, subsidized new large industry. These subsidies became necessary to maintain profits and hence productivity (Davis, 1963). Chilean capitalists were increasingly placed in a position of dependence on the state for survival, profitability, and growth.…”

Section: The Formation Of a Middle Classmentioning

confidence: 99%