This latest installment of Markos Mamalakis’s monumental statistical series appears at an especially appropriate time. He provides a treasure house of numbers to illuminate the debate over the current economic calamity in Chile, while also contributing to the longstanding historical controversy over inflation and stabilization. That is a formidable achievement, considering that country’s radical fluctuations in monetary and financial institutions, policies, and indexes in the twentieth century.
Volume 4 furnishes abundant information on money, prices, financial services, the stock market, and regional and sectoral credit allocations. Scholars who have used the previous three compilations will be pleased to find some of those statistics (for example, on the labor force) updated. Although historians might complain that only one-sixth of the 250 tables here contain data from before 1930, the author promises that Volume 5 will fill that gap. Meanwhile, the current tome should prove particularly useful to students of the Augusto Pinochet period (1973-83).
This effort merits high praise for its exhaustive and systematic collection of financial statistics. It also deserves accolades for its sophisticated treatment of sources, terminology, laws, and institutions. Mamalakis takes a methodologically sound approach: for example, presenting adjusted along with unadjusted figures. Moreover, he tries to advance the art by suggesting some improvements in national accounting and data collection.
The bibliography is also very useful, but incomplete. It particularly neglects more interpretive materials on money and banking issues. Among several noteworthy omissions, the most significant include: César Araneda Encina, Veinte años de historia monetaria de Chile; P. S. Conoboy’s dissertation on “Money and Politics in Chile, 1878-1925”; Albert O. Hirschman, Journeys toward Progress; Edwin Walter Kemmerer’s numerous reports; Julio Pérez Canto, Reforma del régimen monetario; Adolfo Ruffat, La política monetaria y el sector externo en Chile entre las dos guerras mundiales; and Roberto Soto Vera, La inflación monetaria en Chile.
Mamalakis concentrates his own interpretations on the boom and crash during the past decade of military rule. He argues persuasively that Pinochet’s monetarist policies mistakenly relied upon foreign credits to compensate for domestic expenditures in excess of production. A coalition between financiers and importers engineered fixed exchange rate, trade liberalization, and external borrowing programs that discriminated against other sectors and classes and soon wrecked the national economy. During the 1970s, Chile became a service economy (employing 58 percent of the labor force by 1981) and an import economy, pumped up by foreign loans. Procyclical policies then rendered that free-market system exceptionally vulnerable to the recession of 1982, which by 1983 had slashed productivity and employment more than during the Great Depression of 1930-32. As a result of that earlier disaster, Chileans had repudiated military dictatorship and laissez-faire dogma in the 1930s. Whether this second catastrophe will foment similar changes remains to be seen.
Both as a research tool and as an economic analysis, therefore, this book is immensely welcome. It constitutes an essential acquisition for all major libraries and a model for scholars of other countries. Future researchers will be grateful to Mamalakis for this and the other invaluable volumes published to date, as well as projected ones on banking and finances, trade, transportation, services, and government budgets. The profession, like Chile, is in debt.
