Uruguayan economists are mostly leftist
Does this explain the difference in the quality of political and market institutions in this country?
According to the Institutional Quality Index, Uruguay shows one of the best performances in the region, only one place behind Chile, a country that led the Latin American countries in this regard for the last 20 years. No only that, and considering the situation in Chile, Uruguay will most probably take the lead in the region next year. Chile is 30°, Uruguay is 31°, and then Costa Rica at 34°.
Therefore, it is somewhat surprising (maybe a little), that most economists in this country are on the left of the political spectrum. The information comes from a paper titled “Consensos, disensos e ideología: el caso de los economistas en Uruguay”, by Verónica Amarante - Marisa Bucheli - Cecilia Lara, from Universidad de la República: https://www.colibri.udelar.edu.uy/jspui/bitstream/20.500.12008/31716/6/DT%20E%202022%2003.pdf
They polled graduates from that government university, the only one giving the degree up to 1995, when three private universities joined the field. They contacted around 3,300 graduates and got feedback from 27% of them, which they say is the average in similar research in other countries. They asked them questions about the fundamentals of economic science, market solution and government intervention, inequality and redistribution, discrimination, education policy and the environment.
They also tried to capture the “ideological” position of the graduates asking them to qualify themselves on a scale from 1 to 10, being 1 extreme left and 10 extreme right. We all know this is a simplification , how would libertarians qualify themselves? Anyway, simple as it is, it gives us a picture of the prevailing ideas in the country. In this, they follow Latinobarometro’s poll from all over the region with the same scale. They then qualified the answers into left (1, 2 and 3), center (4 and 5), and right (6 or more). Why are there more qualifications in the right they do not say but it does not matter for our purpose, Latinobarómetro has a zero also, so they have four positions on the left.
This gives them 45% on the left, 32% center, and 23% on the right. That shows a clear trend, quite different from Latinobarómetro in LA, which is 30.5 % left, 33.2 % center and 36.4% right with the whole population, and people with university are somewhat to the left of the general population: 34.3% left, 35.8 center and 30% right but still far from what the researchers get for Uruguay.
You can look for the paper for more detail analysis of the results. My question here has to do with the following: is there any correlation here with the more specific outcome of the ICI? The Index has two components: the quality of political institutions and the quality of market ones. Chile, for example, is 35° in political and 28° in market, but Uruguay is very well positioned in political institutions, 22°; but not so much in market ones, 46°. Costa Rica is closer to Uruguay (29° and 43°).
I do not know of a research like this in Chile but we all know the influence of the Chicago boys in their economy, or if not Chicago, other American universities. Neither in Costa Rica. Could we say the situation in Uruguay is, at least in part, explained by the ideological bias of its economists? And has this anything to with the fact that most of them are graduates from a government university?
I cannot say, I just think they are interesting hypothesis to explore.