Economic Inequality In South America Essay

The region of Latin America has invariably been classified as having the highest levels of economic inequality in the world, with its nations characterized by extreme disparities in the distribution of wealth, income and consumption. The particular unequal distribution of productive assets, including land, skilled labor and capital (Huber and Stephens, 2012) is said to reflect an inverse pyramid (Hoffman and Centeno, 2003). It can be argued that the continent 's contemporary patterns of economic inequality cannot be fully interpreted without examining the historical processes of development and waves of globalization. Therefore, this essay will seek to examine the impact of the polarized political, economic and social institutions and power

This "inward-looking development" (Bértola and Ocampo, 2003), has been scrutinized, explicitly concerning its ability to alleviate Latin America 's economic inequality. This is due to its nurturing of corruption and inefficiency through increased government regulation, and its widening of the gap between rural and urban classes, through low food prices and unbalanced public investment in the urban areas, which made it hard for the rural population to profit (Cupples, 2013). ISI failed to induce employment as cities were unable to tackle high levels of rural-urban migration, which strengthened multinational corporations as a result of cheap labor. This merely worsened economic disparities, as the concentration of income became increasingly concentrated in lesser hands (Armendáriz and Larraín B, 2017). In larger nations, namely Brazil, ISI was successful in achieving economic growth, meanwhile, in smaller nations, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, ISI was unsuccessful in encouraging the production of goods beyond basic goods (Lepeley et al., 1998). Ultimately economic inequality prevailed, and in some cases, was exacerbated, due to the uneven distribution of wealth across and within nations (Baer,

Iberian colonialism continues to be an inherent underpinning of the historical processes of development and globalization that contribute to economic inequality. Land tenure patterns established during this period have endured, where the landowning elite groups and oligarchies have maintained highly skewed levels of political, social and economic power. This carried into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the region 's subordinate relationship with the United States, who intervened in affairs to protect self-interests and elite agendas rather than to the majority of the population. The overall failure of the import substitution industrialization policy engendered corruption and inefficiency which led to the debt crisis and structural adjustment programs, which exposed the failure of the political regimes in implementing effective economic programs, keeping the polarized institutions in place. Overall, Latin America 's manifestations of development and globalization over the last several centuries has given rise to widespread economic inequality, which over generations, has strengthened and modernized, and still threatens the region 's economic