Question Regarding Obama’s Signals Toward Latin America
How come President Obama can find time to call and congratulate Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on his reelection (someone who has said that he prefers “a thousand times” to be a friend of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez than to be an ally of the United States) but can’t find time to meet with, or at least issue a statement supporting, Cuban dissidents at the White House as his predecessors did?
NPR and El Salvador: Setting the Record Straight
NPR had a story this morning on “social inequalities and growing discontent in El Salvador.” Relying exclusively on anecdotal evidence, the story was full of mischaracterizations about the economic and social reality of that country.
Let’s see: Regarding the upcoming presidential election this Sunday, NPR says,
…whichever candidate wins, he faces a faltering economy, entrenched poverty, rampant crime and a population that’s still recovering from a civil war.
Granted, rampant crime is a major problem—unfortunately El Salvador is the most violent country in the world—but a faltering economy? NPR didn’t provide any evidence aside from anecdotes.
Actually, El Salvador has made enormous progress thanks to an aggressive agenda of market reforms. Once you account for revised population data due to a new census, El Salvador’s per capita GDP has grown by 3.3 percent since 1992—the third highest rate in Latin America during this period, after the Dominican Republic (3.8) and Chile (3.6). And as I point out in my new paper on El Salvador, there is ample evidence that official figures significantly underestimate the performance of the economy, mostly because the service sector—an area in which El Salvador leads the region—is grossly undervalued in the country’s estimation of GDP. The economy is probably more than 30 percent larger than indicated by the official data. Thus the average per capita growth rate since 1992 has been approximately 5.2 percent per year.
Entrenched poverty? Since the end of the civil war in 1992, the number of households below the poverty line has diminished by more than 25 percentage points. Extreme poverty has also declined by almost 18 percentage points. During the first decade of the market reforms, net enrollment in primary education increased by close to 10 percentage points, infant mortality declined by 40 percent, and the population without access to safe water was halved. Yes, almost 35 percent of Salvadoran households still live in poverty, but by any indicator, poverty is in retreat.
One of the most telling facts about how tough life is in El Salvador right now is that a quarter of its population chooses not to live here. An estimated 2 million Salvadorans out of a population of less than 7 million live and work in the United States.
It is true that approximately 2 million live outside, but the bulk of Salvadorans who immigrated to the U.S. left during the period of civil conflict. Immigration has certainly continued, but presenting it in its entirety as a sign of economic hardship, as NPR correspondent Jason Beaubien does, is misleading.
El Salvador has moved aggressively under the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA party, to align its economy with the U.S. In 2001, it adopted the U.S. dollar as its sole currency, and in 2006, it ratified a free-trade deal with the United States. The trade agreement led to a modest boost in exports, but in the market, shoppers and shopkeepers say it hasn’t helped them.
How does adopting free market reforms constitute an effort to “align” the economy to the U.S.? By liberalizing their economy, Salvadorans authorities are protecting the cash value of pensions and salaries, lowering interest rates, have incentivized savings, and provided modern and affordable public services, etc. Their goal was to make the Salvadoran economy more dynamic and competitive, not to “align” it to the U.S.
Also, the increase in exports since CAFTA was implemented three years ago has been anything but “modest.” Exports were 34 percent higher last year than in 2005, the year before CAFTA went into effect. From 1991 to 2007 El Salvador had the highest export growth rate in all Latin America.
This is not to say that there aren’t serious challenges facing El Salvador. As I said earlier, crime is the most serious of all, and the main source of popular discontent in the country. The country is feeling the consequences of the global economic downturn, as are most developing countries. But the way that NPR presents life in El Salvador demands a serious reality check.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
New Podcast: ‘El Salvador’s Choice’
El Salvador is becoming an economic success story in Central America, says Cato scholar Juan Carlos Hidalgo.
Since 1992, the country has undertaken an aggressive program of liberalization that has transformed its economy and yielded major improvements in various socioeconomic areas. In a new study, Hidalgo explains how El Salvador “is showing the rest of the region how economic freedom can pave the way for development and how globalization offers great opportunities for developing countries that are willing to implement a coherent set of mutually supportive market reforms.”
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Hidalgo explains how despite recent economic reforms, next week’s election in El Salvador could end with a government that has great admiration for the policies of Hugo Chavez that would turn El Salvador away from market-based reforms.
A third of the [voting] population is under thirty. So that means many young voters don’t remember El Salvador as it was during the early 1990’s… Young people have trouble paying for their cell phone bills, have trouble paying their gas bills and have trouble paying for tuition in colleges. What they don’t remember is fifteen years ago they didn’t have cars, their parents didn’t have cars, their parents didn’t have any cell phones and their parents lived in shanty towns….
…Even though they talk about emulating the socialist revolution in Venezuela, they haven’t been explicit about dismantling democratic institutions in El Salvador.
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