Yes, Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, but that isn't a new title they recently earned, rather it's the blight they have had for decades.

Bolivia largely deferred to the free-market consultants such as Jeff Sachs in the 80's and 90's, and was met with stagnant growth. I understand clearly your stance against nationalization of natural resources, but, for Bolivia, it meant claiming greater share of their energy revenues from foreign firms, PetroBras chief among them.

That's ok that you don't take my word for it, you can check the IMF's year-over-year GDP, as well as GDP per capita tracking. Sanchez de Lozada, the pro-market President was run out of town in 2003. President Evo Morales, Socialist, took office in 2005
<a href="http://www.indexmundi.com/bolivia/gdp_(official_exchange_rate).html"> Bolivian GDP

<a href="http://www.indexmundi.com/bolivia/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html"> Bolivian GDP per capita

Perhaps it's too soon to talk about what 2010 will look like for Bolivia. Remember that commodity prices in 2009 were the correction for the 2008 bubble. With that in mind, I'm yet to hear from anyone who says that energy commodities will do anything but go up over the long term.

U.S. and Bolivia are indeed losing out on each other by their current icy relations, but understand it is largely tied to coca eradication policies. No other country wages war on drugs like America does, and so American-Bolivian trade situation is rather unique.

I think the passage about foreign investment is incomplete. Sure, Argentina and Bolivia were scared off, but Iran and Venezuela have since stepped up (Believe me, I know that is its own can of worms (if you are a poor farmer, do you care?)) and you can be sure the Chinese will fill the void of the US in short order.

<i>Bolivia largely deferred to the free-market consultants such as Jeff Sachs in the 80’s and 90’s, and was met with stagnant growth. </i><p>
What credit do you give de Lozada for stopping hyperinflation?

This is discouraging. Having an opinion at the level of abstraction of whether the government is “too involved in the economy” is daft. Without the legal and regulatory infrastructure of government there would not be much of an economy. The myth of the noble savage economy unfettered by government, as it were, is so profoundly ignorant as to be a neurotic fantasy.

The overriding problem and the preeminent cause of the Great Recession has been the abdication of government responsibility in favor of concentrated moneyed interests such as financial oligarchs, medical and military industrial complexes and insurance companies just to finger the key culprits. Nothing has changed under Obama.

As far as the responses that garnered more than 50 percent about what government should be doing to help the economy, the bloggers sound like they’ve been too busy blogging to do their research. Their recommendation for more high skill immigration is not simply a matter of moving people from, say, India to the U.S. If they had done their homework they would have realized that “virtual immigration” is accelerating during the Great Recession (see the recent Dallas Fed economic letter on the subject). Because of communications technologies there is less need to move people across geographic borders when the products of their labor in the form of information can be moved more quickly at lower cost.

Again, the responses / opinions about business regulation in the abstract is puerile at best. What matters is (A) the nature of the regulations and (B) whether and how they are enforced.

As for international trade the U.S. government tilts it in favor of corporations that help defray their political campaign expenses. America functions like a corporate banana republic. So called developing countries, especially the poorer ones such as in Africa are exploited by U.S. trade policies. International trade is neither free nor equal. Read Stiglitz’s books for a better understanding (Making Globalization Work and Globalization and its Discontents).