Economic Growth and Income Distribution in Argentina and the People´s Republic of China, 2002-2012. Notes for further discussion

GUSTAVO SANTILLÁN

Shanghai

Workshop; Sino-Latin American Relationship in the Next Decade; 2013

Institute of International Studies

The struggle for equality and social justice has been the most important claim of the progressive political forces embedded into the world capitalist system, from the French Revolution up to the present days. Moreover, the fulfillment of this goal has constituted a pattern for the evaluation of the entity of these forces as such, whenever they reached participation or access to political power and State structures. In this light, the first decades of the XXIst century constitutes an interesting stage for the observation of the evolution of social equality in the economies and societies of the global South. This work propose, therefore, to establish a comparative analysis of this dimension in Argentina and the People?s Republic of China (PRC), for the 2002-2012 period. The choice for this time span obbeys to the detection of significant and parallel movements in both countries, because a) In Argentina took place a change in economic policy, starting by a profound devaluation of the peso (in a 40% rate), opening enlarged maneuvre margins to the government for the exercise of social policy; secondly, this renewed margins were in turn expanded by a boom in commodity exports, driven by and improvement in the trade terms for the country; finally, this new price relation is allowed in good measure by the increase of the Chinese demand for commodities. b) In the PRC, together with the change of the political leadership following the proclamation of Hu Jintao as the new General Secretary of the Communist Party, a reorientation of the economic model is announced, placing the reduction of different kinds of inequalities across the country as a major priority. We will try to establish the results of the reorientation mentioned above, trying to draw some conclusions for debate.