The.Economist.2007-02-10 (966424), страница 12
Текст из файла (страница 12)
The economy has stopped contracting.Venezuela supplies subsidised oil and Haitians in the United States send money home. But Haiti stilldepends on foreign aid for over 65% of the state budget. A job-creation scheme, backed by $128m fromthe United States and the World Bank, is only just starting up. According to the bank, 83% of skilledHaitians live abroad. Driven out by instability and poverty, they have yet to show any sign of returning.The motto of Colonel Magno's brigade is: “To be more than it seems”. That is Mr Préval's task, too, ifHaiti is to become a functioning nation-state. Enough has been achieved to warrant staying the course.But the burden will increasingly be on Mr Préval to produce results.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
All rights reserved.About sponsorshipBrazilParliament or pigsty?Feb 8th 2007 | RIO DE JANEIROFrom The Economist print editionA failed campaign to clean up a tarnished legislatureIT MAY be one of the world's largest and most unruly legislatures, but presiding over the lower chamberof Brazil's Congress is a powerful and much-prized job. On February 1st, after a bitter campaign, in whichthree candidates variously invoked the heroes of Brazilian independence, famous abolitionists and Moses,the post went to Arlindo Chinaglia, a congressmen from the ruling Workers' Party (PT).
History, havingbeen invoked, will judge him on whether he restores the institution's reputation, which is at rock bottom.A recent opinion poll commissioned for Veja, Brazil's biggest newsweekly, found that most respondentsregarded their national legislators as underworked, self-serving, and dishonest. Nearly half of thosepolled called them liars while two in five said that democracy would be better off without Congress. “Thisgeneration of politicians is lamentable,” says Bolívar Lamounier, a political scientist in São Paulo.
“Notlong ago, you could find maybe 20 parliamentary leaders of national stature. Today you'd be lucky to findtwo.”Part of the problem is the fragmentation of Brazilian politics. No fewer than 21 political parties arerepresented in the 513-seat chamber, up from 19 last time. But only seven of these have a nationalpresence, the rest being flags of convenience. More than a fifth of the last Congress switched parties,usually in return for favours, some of them half-a-dozen times. The difficulty of assembling a majorityensnared the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a succession of scandals in theprevious legislature.Those scandals toppled several of Lula's closest aides, including José Dirceu, his former chief of staff.According to Brazil's attorney-general, Mr Dirceu ran “a sophisticated criminal organisation” to buy votesin Congress.And yet voters seemed unmoved.
Though it took an unexpected run-off vote, Lula won a second fouryear term last October. While nearly half the old Congress was turned out, a dozen governmentsupporters caught out in misdeeds remain in the legislature. They include João Paulo Cunha of theWorkers' Party, whose wife took 50,000 reais ($24,000) in off-the-books payments from a politicalmoneyman. Mr Chinaglia is close to Mr Dirceu, who hopes to persuade Congress to pardon him andrestore his right to run for office. “Congressional inquests are important for exposing the facts, but notenough to convict the culprits,” says Mr Lamounier. “People get weary of scandals.”Lula's response was to promise political reform.
But that is asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. It takesa more determined president than Lula to pilot unpopular measures through a legislature where lawsstand or fall on the whims of special interests, regional claques and a voracious demand for pork andpatronage. For day-to-day business, governments rely on “provisional measures”. These are decrees byanother name. They can be rejected by Congress, but in practice it tends to rubber-stamp them.For a brief moment, it looked as if the new Congress might see a serious clean-up.
Piqued by an attemptby lawmakers to almost double their salaries, a cross-party group of legislators launched an independentcandidate for president of the lower house. Gustavo Fruet, a youngish member of the opposition Party ofBrazilian Social Democracy, promised to “moralise” Congress by cutting (and making public) the amountlegislators spend on themselves.The uprising failed. In a secret ballot, Mr Chinaglia won by 18 votes, many of them it seems cast by MrFruet's own party on the unspoken understanding that the PT would cede it the post of deputy leader inCongress and the upper hand in the São Paulo state legislature.
Parochial back-scratching trumpedethics. “We never thought we could win,” says Fernando Gabeira, one of the congressional rebels. “Butbringing public pressure is important to keep Congress transparent and honest.”Mr Chinaglia won partly by vowing to defend Congress against its detractors. “Whoever attacksparliament...also attacks democracy,” he intoned. The more difficult task is to protect Braziliandemocracy from itself.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipArgentinaCooking the booksFeb 8th 2007 | BUENOS AIRESFrom The Economist print editionThe government massages bad newsWHEN a dash for economic growth produces double-digitinflation, most governments change their policies.
But not thatof Argentina: it has opted to keep the policies and change theinflation numbers. Last month, it sacked the head of theconsumer-prices section of the National Statistics and CensusInstitute (INDEC), replacing her with Beatriz Paglieri, a tradespecialist at the economy ministry. Five days later the instituteannounced that January's inflation was 1.1%. Privateeconomists estimate that the real figure was between 1.5% and2%.This crude statistical jiggery-pokery suggests that officialsreckon that inflation might be the only obstacle preventingNéstor Kirchner from winning a second term in a presidentialelection in October (though his wife may stand in his stead).After collapsing in 2001-02, the economy has notched up fouryears of growth of 9%.
It has shown clear signs of overheating(see chart). The government's response was price-freezing“agreements” with many businesses. But prices are still rising.Ms Paglieri has the confidence of Guillermo Moreno, the secretary of internal trade and the government'schief price enforcer. To arrive at the 1.1% figure for January, she apparently changed the institute'smethodology.
It dropped from the index prepaid annual health-insurance policies, which come up forrenewal in January and whose average cost rose by 22% over the past year. It also changed its sampleof tourism companies, reporting that holiday costs had risen by only 3.7% in January, compared with16.7% in the same month last year.
According to an economist who formerly worked at the institute,between them these two changes reduced the inflation rate by 0.8 of a percentage point.Officials may have had an eye on annual salary negotiations between unions and employers, which startthis month. But “unions read the newspapers too, and the perception that people have of inflation is verydifferent from the index,” says Javier González Fraga, a former central-bank president.Argentina is still a long way from a return of the hyperinflation of the 1970s and 1980s. But manyeconomists believe that prices of goods and services not covered by price controls will rise by 13-15%this year.
Nipping inflation in the bud would require a rise in interest rates and curbs on public spending,as well as letting the peso appreciate. But first there is an election to be fought. It is shaping up to be awar of numbers.Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.About sponsorshipPeruSweet timesFeb 8th 2007 | CHICLAYOFrom The Economist print editionPrivatisation heralds a sugar boomIN THE 1960s, Peru's sugar industry was among the most efficient in the world. It was all downhillthereafter.
A military government expropriated the sugar estates on the country's north coast, turningthem into government-owned co-operatives. Having peaked at 1m tonnes in 1975, output fell to 400,000tonnes by the early 1990s. But since then the sugar industry has passed into private hands again. Overthe past decade production has returned to its historic peak—and is now set to boom.The change has been gradual.
![](https://s.studizba.com/z.php?f=/templates/si/i/noavatar.png&w=100&h=100&t=1"){kind=avatar}
