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[NNWM] Thinking Portuguese, Sort-Of
Nov. 16th, 2004 04:51 pmI'll try to plug along with NaNoWriMo. I bought NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem! today, employee discount included. It's hopeful; I'm hopeful.
Yesterday, while I was trying to make my way to the Purolator depot in Etobicoke north and south on Kipling, I was thinking about Portugal. More specifically, I was thinking about Portugal's recent economic history. Until the mid-1990s, the European Union had three relatively small upper-middle-income/lower-upper-income economies on its Atlantic and Mediterranean fringes: Ireland, Portugal, and Greece. Long before this year's admission of the central European countries, this number was whittled down to two by Ireland's spectacular economic boom. Greece, in the 1980s still recovering from the previous decade's military dictatorship and maladministered in the 1980s by PASOK, is still recovering lost ground.
Portugal has done middling well, slowly but surely converging towards EU-15 average income, with (according to last year's country survey in the Economist) Lisbon at 90% of EU-15 levels, the interior and north lagging behind, and the Azores and Madeira being more-or-less on par with, say, Slovakia or Estonia. Certainly, Portugal deserves recognition as belonging to that group of countries which have achieved a level of socioeconomic development equivalent or superior to that achieved by Atlantic Canada. Way to overcome two generations of crippling Catholic-fascist dictatorship and a decade's worth of draining colonial warfare! Viva Portugal!
Portugal hasn't done as well as Ireland, mind. Abel M. Mateus' study "Portugal's Accession and Convergence Towards the European Union" (PDF format) suggests that Portugal's relatively poor performance can be traced to excessive public expenditures, high taxation, and relatively low productivity. Then again, Portugal did start off the 1960s at two-thirds of Ireland's level of GDP per capita with rather worse social indicators (a high rate of illiteracy, for instance). More importantly, Portugal did not benefit from the massive foreign investment aimed at taking advantage of an inexpensive workforce of colinguals inside an integrated European market that Ireland received from the United States. Certainly, the potential existed for Brazil to achieve First World status at some point in the 20th century, or even before; the relative decline experienced by Southern Hemisphere economies in the second half of the 20th century wasn't inevitable. That it didn't may be a real pity for Portugal, though obviously rather less important than for Brazil itself.
Let's imagine a world, then, where Brazil did achieve First World status. Since it might be too easy for Brazil to avoid its 1980s debt crisis and coast to the level of socioeconomic development now enjoyed by, well, Portugal before convergence slows down, let's say that Brazilian First World status is attained and retained no later than 1950. Barring much larger foreign immigration at a much earlier date, Brazil's population is never going to reach its current level of more than 180 million--too much of Brazil's large population was produced by Third World rates of population growth in the second half of the 20th century. In 1903, there were estimated to be just under 20 million Brazilians; assuming that Brazil's population grows as quickly as Australia's or Canada's, that would produce a population of roughly 100 million. If there's more immigration, the population could be larger, though I'd place 150 million as the upper limit; if development begins earlier, populations could be still smaller so that there might be, at 80 million, only as many Brazilians alive as there are Germans. (I'm excluding Argentina's tenfold population growth as an anomaly produced firstly by the late start of rural settlement and urban emigration and secondly by Argentina's delayed demographic transition; uniquely among First and near-First World countries, particularly among Latin Catholic societies, the fertility rates of Argentina remain well above replacement levels.) It's further fairly unlikely that Brazil would attain the anomalously high levels of GDP per capita of the United States, and that GDP per capita would be on par with that of western Europe, Canada, or Australasia. The most generous estimates suggest that the net result would be, at its most generous, an economy perhaps 40% the size of the United States' now and royughly comparable to Japan's, at roughly four trillion American dollars as measured at purchasing-power parity, a domestic market roughly comparable in size to Japan's.
What kind of impact would this wealthy Brazil have on Portugal? For starters, there might be fewer Portuguese living in Portugal. Ireland's population consistently shrunk throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as Irish fled a poor country with a repressive cultural and political establishment by the hundreds of thousands. How much more so Portugal, with its own strong currents of emigrants directed to (among many other destinations) southern Brazil? A wealthy, presumably liberal-democratic, and presumably anti-Communist Brazil (though perhaps anti-Communist more in the mold of Gaullist France than of Atlanticist West Germany) would also have interesting repercussions on the internal and colonial policies of Salazar-era Portugal.
At this point, my knowledge base gives way and I have to stop speculating. Surely, the effects on the wider world (South America, the South Atlantic, the West) would be rather more significant. It's a fun exercise, though, and potentially profitable.
Yesterday, while I was trying to make my way to the Purolator depot in Etobicoke north and south on Kipling, I was thinking about Portugal. More specifically, I was thinking about Portugal's recent economic history. Until the mid-1990s, the European Union had three relatively small upper-middle-income/lower-upper-income economies on its Atlantic and Mediterranean fringes: Ireland, Portugal, and Greece. Long before this year's admission of the central European countries, this number was whittled down to two by Ireland's spectacular economic boom. Greece, in the 1980s still recovering from the previous decade's military dictatorship and maladministered in the 1980s by PASOK, is still recovering lost ground.
Portugal has done middling well, slowly but surely converging towards EU-15 average income, with (according to last year's country survey in the Economist) Lisbon at 90% of EU-15 levels, the interior and north lagging behind, and the Azores and Madeira being more-or-less on par with, say, Slovakia or Estonia. Certainly, Portugal deserves recognition as belonging to that group of countries which have achieved a level of socioeconomic development equivalent or superior to that achieved by Atlantic Canada. Way to overcome two generations of crippling Catholic-fascist dictatorship and a decade's worth of draining colonial warfare! Viva Portugal!
Portugal hasn't done as well as Ireland, mind. Abel M. Mateus' study "Portugal's Accession and Convergence Towards the European Union" (PDF format) suggests that Portugal's relatively poor performance can be traced to excessive public expenditures, high taxation, and relatively low productivity. Then again, Portugal did start off the 1960s at two-thirds of Ireland's level of GDP per capita with rather worse social indicators (a high rate of illiteracy, for instance). More importantly, Portugal did not benefit from the massive foreign investment aimed at taking advantage of an inexpensive workforce of colinguals inside an integrated European market that Ireland received from the United States. Certainly, the potential existed for Brazil to achieve First World status at some point in the 20th century, or even before; the relative decline experienced by Southern Hemisphere economies in the second half of the 20th century wasn't inevitable. That it didn't may be a real pity for Portugal, though obviously rather less important than for Brazil itself.
Let's imagine a world, then, where Brazil did achieve First World status. Since it might be too easy for Brazil to avoid its 1980s debt crisis and coast to the level of socioeconomic development now enjoyed by, well, Portugal before convergence slows down, let's say that Brazilian First World status is attained and retained no later than 1950. Barring much larger foreign immigration at a much earlier date, Brazil's population is never going to reach its current level of more than 180 million--too much of Brazil's large population was produced by Third World rates of population growth in the second half of the 20th century. In 1903, there were estimated to be just under 20 million Brazilians; assuming that Brazil's population grows as quickly as Australia's or Canada's, that would produce a population of roughly 100 million. If there's more immigration, the population could be larger, though I'd place 150 million as the upper limit; if development begins earlier, populations could be still smaller so that there might be, at 80 million, only as many Brazilians alive as there are Germans. (I'm excluding Argentina's tenfold population growth as an anomaly produced firstly by the late start of rural settlement and urban emigration and secondly by Argentina's delayed demographic transition; uniquely among First and near-First World countries, particularly among Latin Catholic societies, the fertility rates of Argentina remain well above replacement levels.) It's further fairly unlikely that Brazil would attain the anomalously high levels of GDP per capita of the United States, and that GDP per capita would be on par with that of western Europe, Canada, or Australasia. The most generous estimates suggest that the net result would be, at its most generous, an economy perhaps 40% the size of the United States' now and royughly comparable to Japan's, at roughly four trillion American dollars as measured at purchasing-power parity, a domestic market roughly comparable in size to Japan's.
What kind of impact would this wealthy Brazil have on Portugal? For starters, there might be fewer Portuguese living in Portugal. Ireland's population consistently shrunk throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as Irish fled a poor country with a repressive cultural and political establishment by the hundreds of thousands. How much more so Portugal, with its own strong currents of emigrants directed to (among many other destinations) southern Brazil? A wealthy, presumably liberal-democratic, and presumably anti-Communist Brazil (though perhaps anti-Communist more in the mold of Gaullist France than of Atlanticist West Germany) would also have interesting repercussions on the internal and colonial policies of Salazar-era Portugal.
At this point, my knowledge base gives way and I have to stop speculating. Surely, the effects on the wider world (South America, the South Atlantic, the West) would be rather more significant. It's a fun exercise, though, and potentially profitable.
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