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Australia and Chile

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Abstract

At first glance, the political economies of Australia and Chile appear to be worlds apart. Shaped by their different geographical locations, the liberalisation of regional and global trade regimes has made Chile into a major, though certainly not the biggest, player in the South American market, while Australia, along with New Zealand, uneasily but increasingly looks to strengthen ties with Asian trading partners. In terms of absolute wealth, Australia’s output in 1999 measured in GDP per capita was US$ 24,574 compared to Chile’s US$ 8652.1 In addition, the Commonwealth of Australia has been fortunate enough to have experienced uninterrupted democratic rule since gaining political independence, and its welfare system and patterns of property ownership have permitted a relatively egalitarian social structure to develop. In Chile, on the other hand, wealth has tended to be more clearly concentrated in the hands of a local elite, a process that was intensified during the country’s turn to authoritarianism between 1973 and 1990.

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Notes

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  1. University of Auckland, New Zealand

    Paul G. Buchanan (Senior Lecturer in Politics and Latin American Studies)

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, USA

    Kate Nicholls

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Buchanan, P.G., Nicholls, K. (2003). Australia and Chile. In: Labour Politics in Small Open Democracies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403937407_2

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