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Mensaje: <blockquote data-quote="ARGENTVS" data-source="post: 1821725" data-attributes="member: 93"><a href="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_full/public/main/images/Brazil%20monograph%20farm%20sizes.jpg?itok=_sxdzCFf&__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_small/public/main/images/Brazil%20monograph%20farm%20sizes.jpg?itok=uNuWMwy1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a><a href="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_full/public/main/images/Brazil%20monograph%20farm%20sizes.jpg?itok=_sxdzCFf&__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank"> Click to enlarge</a><a href="https://www.stratfor.com/image/farm-sizes-united-states-vs-brazil?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">Farm Sizes, United States vs. Brazil</a>FREETaken together, Brazil faces inflationary barriers at every stage of the growth cycle. Starting a business requires capital, which is in short supply and held by a privileged class. Shipping goods requires scarce infrastructure, which is insufficient to needs, expensive and often owned by a privileged class. Any increase in demand for either of these inputs puts upward pressure on the associated costs. Expanding a business requires skilled labor, but there is not a deep skilled labor pool, so any hiring quickly results in wage spirals. And holding everything back is the still-disconnected nature of the Brazilian cities, so there are few economies of scale. More than anywhere else in the world, growth triggers inflation — which kills growth.Consequently, Brazil has been characterized by below-average growth and above-average inflation for centuries and thus has traditionally been underindustrialized compared to most other developing states. Even before the oligarchs' interests are factored in, any infrastructure projects that make sense will be linked to projects with good foreign cash-generating potential, which quickly narrows the list of likely projects to agriculture and mining (all commodities are U.S.-dollar denominated).As such, Brazil has had little choice but to focus on the production or extraction of primary commodities such as sugar and iron ore. Such capital-intensive industries not only reinforce the oligarchic system but also skew the economy's output. As of 2010, fully 70 percent of Brazil's exports are dollar-denominated, with 45 percent of exports by value consisting of raw commodities. This may help Brazil's (dollar-denominated) bottom line, but it does nothing to address its chronic infrastructure, labor, inequality or inflationary restraints.It is thus unsurprising that Brazil has not yet emerged as a major global power. It cannot economically expand without killing itself with inflation. Its skilled labor pool and capital markets are woefully insufficient for its needs, and the oligarchs have a vested interest in keeping things that way. Even efforts to expand out of the country's various traps have in many ways only entrenched the system. Moreover, what growth Brazil has enjoyed in recent years has been because of the combination of a broad rise in commodity prices and heavy foreign investment into Brazilian infrastructure to get at those commodities, not because of anything Brazil has done.This hardly means that Brazil is either a failed state or that its past is condemned to be its future. What this does mean is that if Brazil is to rise as a major power something has to change. And two things have changed, in fact: Argentina, and the way Brazilians view their country.Modern Argentina's DeclineArgentina has everything necessary to become a major global power. Its lands are flat and temperate, its rivers are navigable and interconnected, and it enjoys the buffer of distance from major competitors and ample resources to fuel a rise to greatness. Indeed, throughout its first century of independence, Argentina moved from victory to victory — first over Brazil, then Paraguay, and then into the ranks of the world's richest states. Standing in Argentina's shadow, it is no surprise that Brazilians developed the tendency to be humble and passive, unwilling to challenge their rich and dynamic southern neighbor.In the aftermath of the War of the Triple Alliance, Argentina enjoyed a historic boom. European immigrants arrived en masse, and the opportunities of the Rio de la Plata allowed for the creation and metabolization of massive amounts of capital. Alone among the Latin American states, Argentina generated a substantial middle class. But Argentina had two weaknesses, and from roughly 1930 on, Argentina's trajectory has been downward.First, unlike in Anglo America, land in Argentina was not widely distributed to individual landholders. Like elsewhere in Latin America, Argentina began with an oligarchic landholder system that left most of the population economically dependent on a small, wealthy elite. A successful backlash to this autocratic structure came in the form of labor unrest that propelled the populist Peron regime to power.The legacy of Peronism is the enhancement of autocratic power by political mobilization of the lower and middle classes. This power has remained consolidated under the control of <a href="https://www.stratfor.com/node/179583?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">a leader</a> whose authority is unquestioned and whose influence over the institutions of the state is near total. Other institutions are much weaker than the presidency, and as a result, policymaking in Argentina is highly dependent on the individual in power at any given time. Populist demands have overpowered more conventional policies for decades on end, resulting in Argentina's slow and irregular decline for nearly a century.Second, the vast distance of Argentina from the rest of the world greatly shaped Argentine perceptions. Tucked away at the bottom of the Atlantic, Argentina is one of the world's most sequestered states. Once Brazil and Paraguay had been contained as local threats, the next closest threat to Argentina was the United Kingdom, some 12,000 kilometers away. As in the United States, such large distances allowed a large degree of cultural insulation and national savings. (There was no need to maintain a large standing military.)But there is a critical difference between the two experiences. The Americans were some 7,000 kilometers closer to potential rivals and thus on occasion were reminded that they are not, in fact, alone. Events such as the 1814 burning of Washington, the European willingness to ignore the Union blockade during the Civil War, the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and, <a href="https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100907_911_and_9_year_war?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">most recently, 9/11</a> unsurprisingly have had a major impact on the American psyche. Each shocked the Americans out of complacency and spurred them to overreact to the sudden "surprise" that the rest of the world exists. In those subsequent spasms of activity, the Americans remake themselves. This process entails a great deal of disruption in the United States and abroad, but it keeps the Americans adaptable.Argentina's greater distance from world affairs means that they have suffered no such revivals following intrusions into their geographic utopia. The War of the Triple Alliance is now 140 years past. The war over the Malvinas Islands, known to Argentines as the Malvinas, was the one notable instance in which Argentina sought interaction with the outside world. Buenos Aires initiated conflict with a far superior military power — the United Kingdom — and the resulting political and military defeat crushed the standing of the Argentine military, heavily contributing to the decline and fall of the military government. Although the Malvinas War had a huge political impact, it did not pose the kind of challenge to Argentine core elements of prosperity that would require a concerted effort at reform and self-renewal. As a result, Argentina has neglected to address national problems that have crept up on it over the decades.Recent developments underline this tendency. An economic crisis in 2001-2002 placed a new populist government in power that <a href="https://www.stratfor.com/node/181118?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">defaulted on the country's debt</a>, which freed Buenos Aires of the need to make interest payments. Rather than seize the opportunity to rebalance the Argentine economic and political system onto a sounder footing that leveraged the country's geographic blessings, the state instead spent the savings on mass subsidies to bolster its populist credentials. High growth resulted, but the policies were only paid for by hollowing out the country's capital stock and distorting the economy to the point where fundamental industries — from <a href="https://www.stratfor.com/node/179366?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">cattle farming</a> to <a href="https://www.stratfor.com/node/177761?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">wheat growing</a> to <a href="https://www.stratfor.com/node/178002?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">energy production</a> — have now begun to fail. High taxes combined with high consumption encouraged by large subsidies and price controls have crippled business owners and agriculturalists alike. The subsidies have proved particularly problematic, as they have locked the government into ever-increasing expenditures expressly linked to the populist patronage the people demand as their right. Consequently, Buenos Aires only wields limited influence in South America and little to none beyond the continent.With all that said, Argentina is still the power in South America with the clearest, most likely growth path. It still holds the Rio de la Plata's river network and it still holds the Pampas, the best farmland in the Southern Hemisphere. What it cannot seem to figure out is how to make use of its favorable position. So long as that remains the case — so long as the natural dominant power of the Southern Cone remains in decline — other powers have at least a chance to emerge. Which brings us back to Brazil.Modern Brazil's SuccessBrazil's challenges are legion, but at core they are as simple as these two issues: Brazil's geography works against it, and its economy is trapped by inflation. The Brazilians have spent decades struggling against these two facts, and in the past generation they have finally achieved significant progress.Brazil's Struggle With GeographyAs discussed, Brazil's core coastal territories present the country with a variety of difficulties that no amount of local development can overcome. Yet Brazil does sport a broad swath of arable land in its interior which is flatter, more temperate and largely unified topographically — the trick is uniting the coastal territories on the east side of the Grand Escarpment with the interior in a way that does not undermine the authority of the state. From the 1870s until the 1980s Brazilian development strategy therefore was relatively straightforward: expand the country's infrastructure, kilometer by painstaking kilometer, into those interior arable zones. The sheer size of the territories that could be put under plow partially overcame the inflationary and transport bottlenecks that limited Brazil's core coastal regions.While early expansion certainly weakened central authority by encouraging economic links to Argentina, as that expansion built upon itself and developed economies of scale, interior Brazil became a formidable economic engine in and of itself. And while Brazil's gaze still lingered on the attractiveness of the Rio de la Plata's transport network, Brazil was sizable enough to have independent economic heft. Under those circumstances, association with coastal Brazil was an economic complication rather than an economic catastrophe.By the 1970s several interlocking factors started solidifying the many interior success stories:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Argentina's deepening malaise lessened the attractiveness of the Rio de la Plata's rivers.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Brazil finally cleared enough interior lands so that more easily shippable conventional cereals were starting to be produced in large quantities, producing a more positive value-bulk ratio in the transport of Brazilian agricultural produce that somewhat eased its transport problem.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Brazil's interior expansion took it right up to the borders of Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, and after some tentative moments, Brazilian infrastructure and capital started moving across the borders and integrating the agricultural lands of the border states into the broader Brazilian economy. Argentina did little to resist. Bit by bit Argentina lost influence in the three states and by 2011 all three have become de facto Brazilian economic satellites.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Foreign investors saw sufficient potential in the Brazilian interior that they were willing to invest increasing sums of their own capital in underwriting both the country's interior development projects and its efforts to assimilate the three border states.</li> </ul>Surprisingly, the clear-cutting of the interior provided the basis of Brazilian political liberalization. One of the many downsides of an oligarchic economic system is that politics tend to become as concentrated as wealth. Yet in clearing the land Brazil created artificial trade ways — roads — that allowed some Brazilians to strike out on their own (though they were not as efficient as rivers). Currently there are some 2.6 million landholders with farms of between 5 and 100 acres (anything less is a subsistence farm, while anything more verges into the category of high-capital factory farms). That is 2.6 million families who have a somewhat independent economic — and political — existence. Elsewhere in the world, that is known as a middle class. The environmental price was steep, but without this very new class of landholder, Brazilian democracy would be on fairly shaky ground.The interior expansion effort solved none of the coastal bottleneck issues, but the constellation of forces certainly conspired to ease Brazil's path. But perhaps the most important aspect of this interior push was that Brazil ceased to be simply a geographic concept. The rising importance of the interior — best symbolized by the relocation of the political capital to the interior city of Brasilia in 1960 — diluted the regional leanings of the coastal cities. The lands of the interior saw themselves first and foremost as Brazilian, and as that identity slowly gained credence, the government finally achieved sufficient gravitas and respect to begin addressing the country's other major challenge.InflationNo economic strategy can allow Brazil to achieve the magic mix of locally determined, strong growth with low inflation. At most, Brazil can have two of the three. For most of the 20th century, Brazilian governments tended to favor growth as a means of containing social unrest and mustering resources for the government, even at the cost of inflation. But since inflation tends disproportionately to harm the poor, the already-wide income gap between the oligarchs and the rest of the population only widened. Since 2006, strong global commodity prices have <a href="https://www.stratfor.com/node/185444?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">allowed the Brazilian economy to grow fairly rapidly</a>, but those commodity prices are based on factors wholly beyond Brazil's control. As with every other commodity cycle, this one, too, will come to an end, triggering all the economic dislocation with which Brazilians are all too familiar.Unless of course, the government changes the game — which it has done.The macroeconomic strategy of the current regime, along with that of a string of governments going back to the early 1990s, is known colloquially as the "real plan" (after Brazil's currency, the real). In essence, the strategy turned Brazil's traditional strategy of growth at any cost on its head, seeking instead low inflation at any cost. Subsidies were eliminated wholesale across the economy, working from the understanding that consumption triggered inflation. Credit — whether government or private, domestic or foreign — was greatly restricted, working from the assumption that the Brazilian system could not handle the subsequent growth without stoking inflation. Government spending was greatly reduced and deficit spending largely phased out on the understanding that all forms of stimulus should be minimized to avoid inflation<a href="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_full/public/main/images/Brazilian_GDP_800.jpg?itok=cKKhWCz0&__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_small/public/main/images/Brazilian_GDP_800.jpg?itok=C73vmOsF" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a><a href="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_full/public/main/images/Brazilian_GDP_800.jpg?itok=cKKhWCz0&__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank"> Click to enlarge</a><a href="https://www.stratfor.com/image/brazilian-gdp-growth-and-inflation-annual?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">Brazilian GDP Growth and Inflation (Annual)</a>FREEIn practice, this led to a series of policies that most economists interpreted as rather orthodox, consisting of extremely low government debt; extremely restrained government activity; and extremely well capitalized, heavily regulated and conservative banks. These strict inflation control policies have achieved a high degree of economic stability. Inflation plunged from more than 2,000 percent a year to the single digits. But those gains came at a cost: Between 1980 and 2005, Brazil has shifted from one of the world's fastest growing economies with one of the highest inflation rates to one of the lowest inflation economies with one of the lowest (if somewhat irregular) growth rates.But the real plan is not an orthodox economic policy. Economic orthodoxy stems from the belief that constrained credit, limited government and low inflation are policy tools designed to maximize growth. Orthodox policies are means to an end. The real plan approaches the question from the other side, in which strong growth is the enemy because it causes runaway inflation that destroys economic, political and social stability. As such, constrained credit, limited government and low inflation are the goals of the real plan, not the means. The distinction is sufficiently critical to bear repeating: Growth is the enemy of the real plan, not its goal.What results is not so much a difference between perception and reality but between what the Brazilian government intended and what the international markets perceive those intentions to be. Investors across the world believe the real plan's ends are in actuality its means — and they interpret those ends as being in perfect sync with their interests. Thus, foreign investors have been voting for Brazil and the real plan with their money. Inward investment to Brazil is at historical highs, with the Brazilian Central Bank projecting the country's 2011 foreign direct investment take at a stunning $60 billion.<a href="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_full/public/main/images/BrazilianDebt.jpg?itok=8nVkEmq6&__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_small/public/main/images/BrazilianDebt.jpg?itok=9b8nOdqv" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></a><a href="https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/stratfor_full/public/main/images/BrazilianDebt.jpg?itok=8nVkEmq6&__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank"> Click to enlarge</a><a href="https://www.stratfor.com/image/brazilian-foreign-debt?__hstc=43953530.70ffecceb1273ca0cc175b5649e23fce.1435081025161.1435081025161.1435081025161.1&__hssc=43953530.6.1435081025162&__hsfp=3496490769" target="_blank">Brazilian Foreign Debt</a>FREEAll this money is working against the real plan's goals: introducing credit where the government seeks to constrain credit, overfunding banks that the government wants to keep tightly regulated, encouraging spending that the government deems dangerous. Brazilians may be feeling richer because of the cheap, imported credit, but for government planners the environment is becoming ever more dangerous, threatening the hard-won stability that the real plan seeks to sustain. At the time of this writing, annualized inflation has edged up to 6 percent, right at the government's redline.The true success of the real plan lies in achieving economic stability and, most of all, control. Brazil's geographic and social challenges are daunting, and no government could hope to address them competently if it could not first master local macroeconomic forces. In this, the real plan has performed to design. While hardly dead, inflation is restrained — and that has given the government space to start addressing the myriad other issues the country faces.As with the interior expansion plan, the success of the real plan has changed how Brazilians feel about their country. When inflation burned through poor citizens' savings, when it destroyed livelihoods and condemned tens of millions to lives of poverty, faith in central institutions was lacking. The real plan may not promise great growth or even great wealth, but it has delivered price stability — and with price stability people can lay at least a limited groundwork for their own futures. Savings holds value from year to year. Purchasing power is constant. These are basic economic factors that most of the developed world takes for granted but which are relatively new to the current generation of Brazilians — and Brazilians rightly credit their central government with achieving them.Just as the interior expansion effort provided all of the Brazilian states with a vested political interest in the Brazil project, the real plan has provided all of the Brazilian states with a vested economic interest in the central government. It is not so much that the real plan removed the structural and geographic causes of Brazil's inflation problem — which is impossible to do — but it proved to Brazilians that their country could be economically stable and that their government could act in the interests of Brazil in its totality rather than simply for whichever state happened to hold the presidency at the time.</blockquote>

Verificación: Guerra desarrollada entre Argentina y el Reino Unido en 1982