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Chile’s new entrepreneurs and the “economic miracle”: The invisible hand or a hand from the state?

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Abstract

The Chilean economy has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade, thanks to a dramatic increase in export activities (and earnings), and the emergence of a more entrepreneurial capitalist class. This article attempts to explain that remarkable phenomenon using original data on entrepreneurs in one of Chile’s most important new export industries, namely, fishing. The central argument of the article is that domestic entre-preneurship flourished during the Pinochet period not because the state “got the economic environment right,” as the neoliberal ideologues are wont to argue, but rather because the Pinochet government behaved, in several important senses, like a “developmental state,”a la the states of East Asia. The analysis also reveals a heretofore ignored role of a developmental state, which is to help produce a new capitalist class culture. In the Chilean case, it was state policy as well as ideology that gave rise to a new generation of entrepreneurs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Energy and Resources Group, University of California, 310 Barrows Hall, MC#3050, 94720, Berkeley, CA

    Rachel A. Schurman

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  1. Rachel A. Schurman
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Correspondence to Rachel A. Schurman.

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Rachel A. Schurman is assistant professor in the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her primary interests are in environmental sociology, and the role that natural resource industries play in regional economic development. She is currently working on the changing character of the tuna industry in the Western Pacific afters the Third U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Her next project will be a book on the economic and ecological sustainability of natural resource-based, export-led growth in Chile.

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Schurman, R.A. Chile’s new entrepreneurs and the “economic miracle”: The invisible hand or a hand from the state?. St Comp Int Dev 31, 83–109 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02719329

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