José Cademartori, argues that the neoliberal model began to enter into crisis in the late 1990s. He points out that sustained export growth had not succeeded in increasing Chile's monetary share of global trade because of the relatively low price of Chile's primary exports. Furthermore, external markets had become saturated or experienced downturns such as the Asian crisis that restricted their ability to import Chilean products. As the dynamism of the export sector waned, domestic industrial production declined as free-trade policies encouraged imports. In the absence of antimonopoly policies, market forces favored the emergence of oligopolies and the formation of conglomerates, 15 of which dominate key sectors of the domestic economy to the detriment of smaller enterprises. Moreover, in what Cademartori describes as one of the most permissive foreign investment environments in the world, transnational capital has penetrated the most dynamic sectors of the Chilean economy, including investments in mining, agribusiness and forestry, communications, electrical power, banking, and finance, realizing profits more than double the world level and three times the Latin American average. Rather than halting the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, the Concertación has sustained it with additional privatizations, regressive consumption taxes, and tax breaks for business and the wealthiest individuals. Furthermore, despite neoliberal ideology, the Concertación has granted a wide variety of subsidies to the most influential corporations, many of them powerful transnationals, while cutting services to average Chileans. Cademartori concludes that neoliberalism is incompatible with true democracy because citizens lack real power, which has been consolidated in the hands of domestic and transnational economic elites to the detriment of the majority. He calls for going beyond Chile's formal democracy to one in which civil society is empowered and the state is responsive to majority interests, although he does not assess the likelihood that this will happen or propose specific means to bring it about.
