A Global Political Economy of the Latin American 'Pink Tide': Poverty, Inequality and Dependent Development in Argentina and Brazil

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My prospective project aims to examine the global politicaleconomy of the rise and fall of the so-called 'pink tide' inLatin America. First coined by Larry Rohter (2005), 'pink tide'refers to the surge of left-wing, non-communist,governments in most Latin American countries -includingVenezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay,Ecuador, and Bolivia- started in the early 2000s and indecline since mid 2010s (Pereira Da Silva 2018). Left-wingparties in these countries, with their nuances anddifferences, were elected under the promise of departingfrom the neoliberal restructuring of the WashingtonConsensus imposed in the 1990s -which put the regionunder severe economic and social crisis- and with thesupport of wide-ranging social movements aiming to reducepoverty and economic inequality (ibid.). However, theirredistributive efforts, entailing both stronger regionalcooperation and major welfare programmes such as'Asignacion Universal Por Hijo' in Argentina or 'Bolsa Familia'in Brazil, have not met the expectations of part of theirconstituencies, paving the way for their decline and the riseof right-wing governments.While these themes are already covered in the scholarlyliterature (Panizza 2009; Webber 2017), this project aims toprovide the first comprehensive assessment of the globaleconomic determinants of the rise and fall of the 'pink tide',with specific reference to the two largest South Americancountries: Argentina and Brazil. The project starts frominvestigating how the reforms implemented in the 1990sintegrated Argentina and Brazil in the global economy andexamines whether this integration exacerbated theircondition of dependent development. The followingimbalanced growth, and associated increase in inequality,can then help us make sense of the social coalition electingleft-wing governments and their redistributive programmes.These are studied with reference to the both the discursiveconstruction of redistribution within an open global economyand the material effects of the policies implemented,especially with regarding poverty and inequality reduction,given their centrality in these governments' policy platforms.The project will then examine the perceived degree ofsuccess of these policies, in order to investigate whetherthey have contributed to the apparent breakdown of thesocial coalition of formal and informal workers on the onehand and sections of the middle classes, including small andmedium entrepreneurs. In sum, the hypothesis that thisproposed project aims to investigate is that the globaleconomic integration under the terms of the WashingtonConsensus inherently limited the transformative, and hencehegemonic, potential of the 'pink tide' governments inArgentina and Brazil, thus constraining their ability to deliveron their own redistributive promises.