High vaccination rates have allowed business across Canada to begin fully reopening after more than a year of shutdowns and restrictions, leading to the country’s slow but steady recovery. Now, at the time of writing, just over 75 per cent of the country’s population have had their second vaccine dose, per the Government of Canada.
With a new year in front of us, many are feeling hopeful for Canada’s continued economic recovery as countries worldwide look to emerge on the other side of the pandemic.Īt the start of 2021, Canadians were eager to receive mass COVID-19 vaccinations to do their part in helping to end the pandemic. He will need them.RBC Economics’ Macroeconomic Outlook identifies key trends, changes, and concerns for 2022 But his team includes a core of experienced politicians. He has placed Alfredo Moreno, a fellow tycoon, in charge of the social-development ministry, for example. Some of his cabinet appointments look odd.
One source close to him insists he has mellowed. In his first government Mr Piñera often seemed to Chileans more the businessman-arrogant, impatient, unempathetic-who understood investors than the politician who cared about ordinary people. A new far-left group, akin to Spain’s Podemos, won 20 of the 155 seats in the lower house of congress. Her electoral reform has made congress more proportional, but weakened the stable two-coalition system of post-1990 politics. Unions were empowered by Ms Bachelet’s labour reform. The student movement has waned, but not much. Chile’s success has made the country harder to govern. The question facing Mr Piñera is whether he can sell his policies politically. It also promises to put more public money into health care and the privately managed pension system.Ĭhile needs better schooling and worker training to raise productivity, diversify the economy and reduce inequality. The new government will focus on making most technical education free and allowing limited top-up fees and selection in schools. “We don’t have that money, we’re not Norway,” says Mr Larraín, who inherits a much weaker fiscal situation than he left. Free higher education would cost 3% of GDP. Mr Piñera is likely to tweak rather than scrap these changes. She promised universal free higher education and banned top-up fees and profits in privately run but publicly financed schools. Unlike her, he will lack a majority in congress and will have to woo the Christian Democrats, centrists who belonged to Ms Bachelet’s coalition. “There will be no retroexcavadora.” The new president could not demolish Ms Bachelet’s legacy if he wanted to. “We want to build on what we have,” says Mr Larraín. A key measure will be improving Ms Bachelet’s hugely complicated tax reform and gradually cutting the corporate income-tax rate from 27%, among the highest in Latin America. His main aim is to restore economic growth to 3.5-4% a year, the most the economy can now manage, says Felipe Larraín, who will be finance minister (as he was in 2010-14). It was Mr Piñera’s economic record, and fear that Ms Bachelet’s candidate would tack even further left, that brought him victory. Her people blame low copper prices her critics blame her reforms. The economy averaged growth of just 1.8% a year under Ms Bachelet, compared with 5.3% under Mr Piñera.
Investment has fallen for the past five years. However laudable her intentions, many of her reforms were polarising, technically flawed and unpopular.īusiness took fright. To achieve this, she abandoned the consensual approach of her predecessors. Ms Bachelet pushed through reforms of tax, education and labour, all aimed at making society less unequal. When one of her allies promised to take a retroexcavadora (the graphic Spanish word for a backhoe loader) to Pinochet’s “neoliberal model” under which many public services are privately provided, she did not contradict him. His successor (and predecessor), Michelle Bachelet, swung to the left, adopting the students’ demands. But faced with a powerful student movement angry over the cost of higher education, he struggled politically. Chileans became less poor, and millions of people went to university for the first time. For two decades after the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990, Chile offered a successful model of an open, free-market economy and gradual social reform under centre-left governments.
0 kommentar(er)
