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Uneven Geographical Developments been transferred from savers to the banks and through them to a political-economic elite. The consequences in terms of social unrest were dramatic and far-reaching. Unemployment soared and incomes fell. Idle factories were occupied by militant workers and set to work, neighbourhood solidarity committees were set up to seek better collective means of survival and the piqueteros (street pickets) blocked transportation networks and mobilized around key political demands.23 In the face of popular opinion, which held the banks, foreign investors, and the IMF in total contempt, Kirchner, the newly elected populist president who succeeded Duhalde, could only snub the IMF, default on $88 billion in debts, and initially offer to pay off outraged creditors at the rate of 25 cents on the dollar.24 Interestingly, Kirchner’s economics team does not have a single US-trained economist in it. Locally trained, they take the ‘heterodox’ view that while the repayment of the external debt is important it should not entail a collapse of living standards in Argentina.

With signs of recovery in 2004, particularly in the manufacturing sector helped by the devaluation, the big problem for Argentina is to face down fierce competition from Brazil and, in the near future, from China as the latter conforms to WTO rules and gains open access to Argentine markets.

This story of Argentina’s rollercoaster experience with neoliberalization illustrates all too well how little neoliberal theory has to do with practice. As a member of the neoliberal Ludwig von Mises Institute has pointed out, the ‘confiscatory deflation’ that occurred in Argentina was quite properly interpreted by its Argentine victims as ‘bank robbery by the political elites’.25 Or, as Veltmeyer and Petras prefer to characterize it, the whole episode reeks of ‘a new imperialism: pillage of the economy, growth of vast inequalities, economic stagnation followed by profound and enduring depression and massive impoverishment of the population as a consequence of the greatest concentration of wealth in Argentine history’.26 South Korea South Korea emerged from the war of 1950–3 a devastated country in a parlous economic and geopolitical position. Its economic turn106