Hassan Akram (Wake Forest University)

XXII IDP Industrial Development and Policy Lecture

Following its transition to democracy in the 1990s, Chile was an early and enthusiastic adopter of the strategy of global economic integration via bilateral and later multilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) as well as through Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). Chile signed is first FTA with Bolivia in 1993 and quickly negotiated agreements with all its major trading partners including the EU (2003), the USA (2004) and China (2006). To date Chile has 26 active FTAs and 37 active BITs, the second highest number in Latin America. The ratification of these treaties by Congress, following their negotiation by the General Directorate of International Economic Relations (DIRECON), was largely a formality, each one passing with very large, near unanimous, majorities demonstrating Chile’s commitment to neoliberal globalisation. When Donald Trump pulled the USA out of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) the Chilean government was instrumental in the resurrection of this multilateral trade pact, which was re-baptised, without the USA, as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CP-TPP). Given Chile’s bipartisan commitment to trade integration through multilateral treaties the government assumed that the ratification of the CP-TPP would be a fait accompli but a very vocal civil society movement engaged in very high mobilisation against it. Although the treaty passed in the Chamber of Deputies there was the highest level of parliamentary rejection of a TLC in Chilean history. We will seek to analyse and understand why multilateral trade integration has become politically controversial in Chile, contrasting the ‘pragmatic’ case against this particular agreement with the broader politicised rejection of the neoliberal project tout court.

Speaker Biography: Hassan Akram is the Director of Wake Forest University’s Chile Centre and also teaches Public Policy at the Diego Portales University where the centre is based. He used to work for the Ministry of Planning and Development in Venezuela when Hugo Chávez was president, and before that at the NGO War on Want when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister. He has a PhD in Social and Political Science from the University of Cambridge, as well as a masters in Development Studies and another in Sociology from the same institution.

Speaker: Hassan Akram (Wake Forest University), Antonio Andreoni (SOAS)

Released by: SOAS Economics Podcasts