Trade with China and strategy in South American recent economic development

Trade between South America and China has been an important source of the high growth shown by those economies in the 2000s. During the globalization of the 1990s, trade between the region and China had not developed so much. A rather sharp growth in China's presence in world trade since the beginning of the 2000s changed the world trade trends for MERCOSUR countries, or, at least, for many of them. The impact of the increasing trade of agrifood has been very relevant, and different per country. Strategy is another important issue, referring to bilateral relations with China. This country should be seen as a partner in the global trade, and not as a new foreign investor for the region, but this may be different in the context of different national strategies of South American countries.

Just how capitalist is China?

In this paper, we review old and modern conceptions of "capitalism" and then we evaluate how "well" China fares on three touchstones of capitalism: competitive markets, generalization of wage-labour, and private ownership of the means of production. While we accept that China has come a long way under the first two criteria since the 1980s, we do not deem China yet to be a full-fledged capitalist economy for the State still wields great power through the allocation of massive state resources and control of large and highly profitable state enterprises, which dominate key sectors of the economy.