Hernán Büchi

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Büchi Buc in 2011, at the Library of the National Congress of Chile

Hernán Alberto Büchi Buc (born March 6, 1949) is a Chilean economist and politician.


Early Life

Büchi was born to a father of Swiss descent in Iquique. After receiving a diploma in mining at the University of Chile he went to the U.S. and earned an MBA from Columbia University in 1975. Despite this fact he is often mentioned together with the Chicago Boys who studied economics at the University of Chicago, because he represents similar neoliberal market positions. In 1975 Hernán Büchi began as a consultant of the Secretary of Economics, Pablo Baraona, as a Chair of the Board of Directors of the state owned sugar refiner Industria Azucarera Nacional as well as the state-owned telephone company Compañía de Teléfonos (since 1978).

Civil Servant Career under the military dictatorship of Pinochet

In 1979 he became Vice-Secretary of Economics (1979-1980) for the ministry of treasury. He worked with the Minister for Labor and Social Security José Piñera, who started the private pension system in Chile. In 1981 he was appointed Vice-Secretary of Health (1980-1983) where he prepared the privatization of health insurance. During the 1983 / 1984 recession in Chile he became Minister of Planning (1983-1984)(ODEPLAN) and Superintendent of Banks and Financial Institutions (1984-1985). He was Minister of Finance(the Treasury) between 1985 and 1989 and returned to the principles of monetarism.

After Pinochet stepped down 1990, Büchi founded the "Liberty and Development Institute" (Libertad y Desarrollo), where he currently is the Chairman of the "International Economy Center Council" and a Consultant. It has been funded by The Tinker Foundation, Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Center for International Private Enterprise, and the conservative German Hanns Seidel Foundation amongst others, per its website .[1] Since 1990 he has been an adviser in several government bodies in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. He has been a chairman and/or member of the board of several public companies. [2]

Presidential Candidate 1990

During the 1989 Chilean presidential election Büchi stood for the centre-right Democracy and Progress PartyUnión Demócrata Independiente but was also supported by Renovación Nacional and Democracia Radical. Büchi's campaign hired a former public relations adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Timothy Bell.[3] Büchi came in second with 2,051,975 votes (29.40%) after Patricio Aylwin with 55,2 %. However he "received more support from women than men in 59 of the 60 electoral districts, the exception being in southernmost district of Magallanes, where his support was about equal between the sexes".[4]

Recent history

Since 1994 Büchi has been the Chair of the Board of Directors the Chilean food company Lucchetti. Since 2003 it has been owned by Andrónico Luksic and his Luksic group, Chile's first multinational corporation, where Büchi holds further positions. He is also Chair of the Board of Directors of the Chilean Mining company.[5] He is a likely member of the Mont Pelerin Society. [6]

Books

In 1996, Büchi detailed his experience as Minister of the Treasury of Chile during 1985-1989, in a book called "The Economic Transformation of Chile: A Personal Account", where he discusses the "liberalization" of the Chilean economy, and the role he played in it. It was translated into English in 2009.

Büchi's appointment as Finance Minister in 1985, according to British historian Edwin Williamson

...marked the beginning of economic recovery. Büchi's strategy was to create the financial conditions for stable, export-led growth and to reorganize the productive structures of the export sector. Control of public spending, periodic devaluations, and incentives for domestic savings, foreign investment and the repatriation of capital gradually brought inflation down to 12 per cent by 1989, the lowest rate in Latin America. A vigorous campaign to sell parcels of the public debt to private investors in exchange for shares in Chilean industries reduced the nation's debt burden by over $4 billion...Economic growth averaged between 5 per cent and 6 per cent in 1985-8, the highest rate in the region.[7]
This paragraph resembles a self-promotional excerpt from Büchi's book.


See also

Notes

  1. ↑ http://www.lyd.com/nosotros/que-es-lyd/ accessed 1-27-2014
  2. ↑ Latam Group Speaker profile http://www.labgbooth.org/conference/speakers/40, accessed 1-27-2014
  3. ↑ Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly. Britain and Chile's Hidden History (Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 217.
  4. ↑ Paul H. Lewis, 'The 'Gender Gap' in Chile', Journal of Latin American Studies (2004), 36: 719-742.
  5. ↑ Latam Group Speaker profile http://www.labgbooth.org/conference/speakers/40, accessed 1-27-2014
  6. ↑ The road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2009. Table 9.2 page 393 accessible at url=http://ebookdig.biz/ebook/q/pdf/archive-totalism-org.html
  7. ↑ Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 508-9.

External links

The Tinker Foundation http://www.tinker.org Media related to Hernán Büchi at Wikimedia Commons

Political offices
Preceded by
Luis Escobar Cerda		 Minister of Finance
1985–1989 		Succeeded by
Enrique Seguel Morel
Authority control
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