At the end of the 20th century, the world experienced an exponential growth of the main

industrialized economies, the United States, Federal Germany, England and the
Scandinavian region, adding to this, in Asia, China continues with an even better growth
than Latin America and the oil countries. from North Africa. (Wionczek, 1985). Related to the
above, the emergence of large and important trade agreements, NGOs and social
movements and conflicts that marked the decades of the 80's and 90's was also seen.

It is opportune to try to define what neoliberalism is, since many times this term is used in a
positive way and many times in a very negative way. Rather, neoliberalism is a series of
ideas, a political-economic theory that, on the one hand, is positioned in favor of individual
freedom, the business sector and the market in order to achieve human well-being, on the
other hand the Neoliberalism positions the State in a role where it must guarantee an
institutional framework to protect the practices carried out by this model. (Harvey, 2005, p.
6).

In this video we will take economic, political and social development data, to analyze and
conclude if neoliberalism plays an important role in the countries where it was implemented
compared to countries where a Welfare State was implemented.

Starting with economic development, according to data from the World Bank, Mexico, the
United States, and Chile had 2.1%, 1.4%, and 4.3%, respectively, from 1980 to 2018, of
annual foreign investment in their GDP. On the other hand, Norway, France and Portugal
had 1.6%, 1.5% and 2.7% respectively of foreign investment.

In an annual average of GDP growth, from 1980 to 2018, we find that Mexico, the United
States and Chile had 2.2%, 2.6% and 4% respectively. For Norway, France and Portugal we
find that they obtained 2.4%, 1.8% and 2% respectively.

For political development, classifications and scores from different non-governmental

organizations will be taken into account. We can see that the case of Norway is the only one
that remains a full Democracy, the cases of France, Portugal, Chile and the US are classified
as Defective Democracies and in the case of Mexico, this is found as a Hybrid Regime .
(The Economist, 2022).

Regarding institutional quality, we find Norway at #2, Portugal at #18, followed by France at
#19, USA #21, Chile #28 and surprisingly Mexico falls to position no. 136. (Liberal Network
of Latin America, 2019). Here we can observe a very large gap in the last three countries,
since Mexico alone has a distance of 108 places with Chile and 134 with Norway.

Finally, we will analyze the social development of the aforementioned countries, by scoring
the quality of their health services and the guarantees of human rights. According to the
2018 public health index, published by the NUMBEO database, France ranks 9th, followed
by Norway 15th, Portugal 26th, Mexico 26th. 28, the US at #29 and Chile at #43.

For the last aspect, the Freedom House organization index will be taken into account, which
classifies countries as free, partially free, and not free, with Chile, the US, France, and
Portugal as Free countries, while Mexico is the only country that is classified as a Partially
Free country.
Once we have these data, analyzing and relating them, we can observe that in economic
matters both neoliberalism and the Welfare State obtain similar results, there is no great
variation in data. This creates an endless number of questions, since it would be expected
that neoliberal states would obtain larger numbers, but this is not the case. So we can
conclude that neoliberal states have not sufficiently demonstrated how capable they are in
economic matters, since the central argument that Neoliberalism exists is that the
management of a country's economy should be controlled by the business sector and not
the State.

In matters of social and political development, we observe that the countries with the Welfare
State outperform the neoliberal ones by a large margin, this has nothing to do one hundred
percent with the political-economic models that are implemented in these countries. There
are more aspects to take into account, such as education and quality of life, which, although
they also go hand in hand with the models already mentioned, it is worth mentioning that
events and forms of cooperation between the societies of the countries will take place in the
issue and will help to understand how social and political development occurs.