Upon arriving in Cochabamba, one of the first things I notice is that the sidewalks are full. At mid-day, high school students congest the sidewalks, talking, laughing, flirting, and then walking off in smaller groups to some other destination.
I can’t walk 20 meters without passing some kind of vendor: indigenous women, part beggars part entrepreneurs, selling shoelaces; portable stores that sell everything from chocolate milk in plastic bags to toilet paper and nail clippers; women with rolling carts and a hybrid orange peeler-squeezer to make fresh juice on the spot.
I compare this to the sidewalks of American suburbia: wide, desolate, buried in a sea of passing cars and exhaust fumes. Yes, Bolivian sidewalks are broken, subject to the same inundations of car noise and exhaust fumes, and dirty, but at least people use them.
In these micro-economies, the wisdom of Adam Smith’s invisible hand becomes more apparent. Though poor by international standards, Bolivians are industrious survivors, and the Bolivian economy remains a local one. Local production, local competition, and local markets adapt nicely to the needs of an “impoverished” population, thus providing jobs and a vast distribution network of goods and services for the majority of the country’s population.
Ask yourself: What kind of impact would a Wal-Mart, an Albertsons, a Home Depot, have on a country like Bolivia? The globalization debate is not about being for or against, but is fundamentally about how we should globalize, and what protections and provisions should be given to local economies, like the Bolivian sidewalk.
One response to “The Foot Economy”
There are already supermarkets popping up everywhere, such as IC Norte in Cochabamba. Many middle class people shop there in order to not have to deal with the traffic, increasing crime in the marketplace and lesser convenience. The prices are not much more expensive.
However, everyone has a right to earn a living and you can run into anything that you might need walking down the Avenue San Martin. But there are still a handful of formalized businesses who must pay rent, taxes and go through all of the legal bureaucracy to operate. What happens when a street vendor can sell the same items right outside the door of a store and not have to pay for the overhead costs?
There must be some balance to a completely informal economy and one that contributes tax revenue and a more orderly city.