AHC: A Powerful Spanish Speaking Country?

Just to throw a bit of a curve ball out there... how about a Spanish speaking Philippines becoming a ferocious tiger economy?

I am a Anglo-Peruvian so my Philippines knowledge is small lol
 
Just to throw a bit of a curve ball out there... how about a Spanish speaking Philippines becoming a ferocious tiger economy?

I am a Anglo-Peruvian so my Philippines knowledge is small lol

Probably not have it fall under the sway of the US as much and maybe better relations with Mexico?
 
Maybe this along with the potential Catholic Church's siding of this and maybe even their calls against leftist rhetoric would cause Catholicism to greater lose popularity within Mexico.
The Church wasn't the real problem. Calles made a mess of Mexico with his atheist desires for the Country. He did as much as any Communist leader to rid the country of religious belief, and that resulted in years of the Cristero Rebellion, that started with peaceful means, with local boycotts like the far better known Montgomery Bus Boycott 30 years later in the US

If under good leadership and if the US leaves well enough alone,

Two big PoDs that were unlikely to happen
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Francoist Spain declares war on Japan in 1943, resulting in Marshall Plan funding after WWII.
The Spanish Miracle starting in 1959 wasn't enough to make Spain powerful. Starting that Miracle a few decades earlier won't be enough either. I'm pretty sure OP means France or UK level of power, which is simply impossible for Spain with any post-Civil War PoD.
 
The argument was convincingly made in 2014 that the true break for Argentina came in the 1970s, when the military government embarked on a period of misgovernment that resulted in lasting damage.

https://moneymaven.io/economonitor/...-a-century-of-decline-4hGmoqTg9EyqcwCcevCtjQ/

https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fmaven-user-photos%2Feconomonitor%2Flatin-america%2F2waTRiClfEK6xXAhSPc8Dg%2Fhu8AWlh7M0KSxnF3fXcfZg


I quote the author, Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla:

This structural break in the evolution of the GDP per capita (GDPpc) in Argentina can indeed be attributed to internal conditions in that country. But other than that, there is not much difference in the evolution of Argentina, when compared to, for instance, Australia, or Uruguay, two countries mentioned by The Economist as either not having suffered the “hundred year decline” and/or to have followed better economic and institutional policies than Argentina. It is true that other countries such as Korea or Spain, which had far lower GDPpc than Argentina during great part of the 20th Century overtook Argentina by a large margin since the 1970s. But it is also true that if Argentina had avoided the sharp drop in the 1970s and maintained the share of the US GDPpc that prevailed before that structural break, the country would have had now an income per capita above all countries in LAC and many European countries such as Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. And if it had maintained the lineal trend growth from the 1960s to the mid 1970s it would be now at about the level of New Zealand or Spain, according to the data of the Maddison Project. In other words, if Argentina had avoided the real tragedy that started in the mid 1970s, the country would be now a developed country.
Assuming that you avoided the 1970s meltdown of Argentina, and the country did evolve along the lines suggested by Diaz-Bonilla, you would have in South America a country as wealthy as Spain and with a population perhaps four-fifths the size of Spain's. (Argentina, I suspect, would if it remained a stable and prosperous democracy have seen rather less emigration; it might even have seen more immigration, from South American neighbours and from elsewhere.)

Would this be enough to meet the initial proposal? I have my doubts: I think Canada under estimates itself, but I also think Canada is far from being a global power along the lines imagined.
 
Uhm, what about a way earlier—a successful Habsburg Empire in Europe centered on Spain dominating the continent?
 
The argument was convincingly made in 2014 that the true break for Argentina came in the 1970s, when the military government embarked on a period of misgovernment that resulted in lasting damage.

https://moneymaven.io/economonitor/...-a-century-of-decline-4hGmoqTg9EyqcwCcevCtjQ/

https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fmaven-user-photos%2Feconomonitor%2Flatin-america%2F2waTRiClfEK6xXAhSPc8Dg%2Fhu8AWlh7M0KSxnF3fXcfZg


I quote the author, Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla:

This structural break in the evolution of the GDP per capita (GDPpc) in Argentina can indeed be attributed to internal conditions in that country. But other than that, there is not much difference in the evolution of Argentina, when compared to, for instance, Australia, or Uruguay, two countries mentioned by The Economist as either not having suffered the “hundred year decline” and/or to have followed better economic and institutional policies than Argentina. It is true that other countries such as Korea or Spain, which had far lower GDPpc than Argentina during great part of the 20th Century overtook Argentina by a large margin since the 1970s. But it is also true that if Argentina had avoided the sharp drop in the 1970s and maintained the share of the US GDPpc that prevailed before that structural break, the country would have had now an income per capita above all countries in LAC and many European countries such as Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. And if it had maintained the lineal trend growth from the 1960s to the mid 1970s it would be now at about the level of New Zealand or Spain, according to the data of the Maddison Project. In other words, if Argentina had avoided the real tragedy that started in the mid 1970s, the country would be now a developed country.
Assuming that you avoided the 1970s meltdown of Argentina, and the country did evolve along the lines suggested by Diaz-Bonilla, you would have in South America a country as wealthy as Spain and with a population perhaps four-fifths the size of Spain's. (Argentina, I suspect, would if it remained a stable and prosperous democracy have seen rather less emigration; it might even have seen more immigration, from South American neighbours and from elsewhere.)

Would this be enough to meet the initial proposal? I have my doubts: I think Canada under estimates itself, but I also think Canada is far from being a global power along the lines imagined.

That is surprising, so even the military juntas pre the Videla junta still keep Argentina going on?
 
I'm gonna go with Argentina here, not powerful in terms of power projection in terms of empire building but with the right investments and ideas it could be an ecomomec superpower easily.

It's relatively out of the worlds conflict zones location, natural resources, and smallish population concentrated.

Argentina could have been the center of invention and precision electronics, something like Japan the linchpin of it's worlds economy.

Imagine a south america that's the primary source of technology. With Argentina the center of this technological empire.
 
The Spanish Miracle starting in 1959 wasn't enough to make Spain powerful. Starting that Miracle a few decades earlier won't be enough either. I'm pretty sure OP means France or UK level of power, which is simply impossible for Spain with any post-Civil War PoD.

Spain is not that far away from the uk or france in standard of living, and could certainly have been there with some better oriented market economic policies along the 20 th century, at several points. true we have never been able to reach where they are, and probably wont in the future (although maybe they reach us...).

A lot of this is related to cultural issues, structural problems etc but it must be taken into account that the country was not the best real state piece of europe regarding climate and agricultural possibilities ( it is good for tourism now and has some areas great for specific crops but most part of the country is quite barren, dry and high so there was always that problem to get things balanced and a strong internal market to start a industrialization process)...
 
The argument was convincingly made in 2014 that the true break for Argentina came in the 1970s, when the military government embarked on a period of misgovernment

Argentina has been in economic trial an error mode for the last 100 years, and it is very difficult to say who is most responsible of the whole thing going wrong. IMHO no one has tried to really let the free market work in a comprehensive way, and the ones that have tried have backpedaled at the firsts setbacks...
 
Just to throw a bit of a curve ball out there... how about a Spanish speaking Philippines becoming a ferocious tiger economy?

I am a Anglo-Peruvian so my Philippines knowledge is small lol


Industrialized Philippines that manages to snag large portions of Indonesia should do the trick
 
That is surprising, so even the military juntas pre the Videla junta still keep Argentina going on?

I think it was a matter not so much of the pre-Videla regimes being good--Argentina underwent the same sort of decline relative to Europe that neighbouring Argentina did, as well as the much richer Australia--as it was a matter of the Videla regime being terrible at running the country. It made a huge mess that later democratic governments were left recovering from.
 
The Spanish Miracle starting in 1959 wasn't enough to make Spain powerful. Starting that Miracle a few decades earlier won't be enough either. I'm pretty sure OP means France or UK level of power, which is simply impossible for Spain with any post-Civil War PoD.

The Spanish Miracle was enough to catapult it into a trillion dollar economy as well as support a military force that was regarded as equal in quality and capabilities to the Anglo-French by the 1990s. To get an idea of how much an effect of no autarky and earlier Marshall Aid funding would have:

This article uses historical fact as a natural experiment to measure a country’s welfare loss from shifting from an allowed to a restricted trade situation, based on international trade theory. A welfare loss of 8 per cent of GDP is found. The evolution of domestic import and export prices in Spain in 1940–58 fits international trade theory assumptions. The main years of autarky are not those commonly considered, but 1947–55, marked by the exclusion of Spain from the Marshall Plan and the Madrid Treaty between Franco’s regime and the US. The upper-bound welfare loss for 1947–55 is 26 per cent of GDP.

A booming Spain from the late 1940s on, instead of a late start in the 1960s, might be sufficient to place it firmly on the same level as the UK or France; i.e. a $2 Trillion + economy.
 
An early PoD is not needed at all. Mexico today is the 15th largest economy in the world measured in nominal GDP and the 11th largest measured with purchasing power parity.

If Mexico had the same GDP per capita as Spain, it'd be larger than every economy in Europe (including Britain and France, generally considered powerful countries).

In short, we really just need 20th century Mexico to have better social/political/economic policies and bam, we have a Spanish-speaking Great Power.

The idea that countries need to grab territories or resources to become rich is IMO silly when postwar Japan became far more prosperous than the Japanese Empire ever was.
 
An early PoD is not needed at all. Mexico today is the 15th largest economy in the world measured in nominal GDP and the 11th largest measured with purchasing power parity.

If Mexico had the same GDP per capita as Spain, it'd be larger than every economy in Europe (including Britain and France, generally considered powerful countries).

In short, we really just need 20th century Mexico to have better social/political/economic policies and bam, we have a Spanish-speaking Great Power.

The idea that countries need to grab territories or resources to become rich is IMO silly when postwar Japan became far more prosperous than the Japanese Empire ever was.

True though Mexico's policies are often dictated and influenced by the United States, as the USA has a nasty history of imposing their will in some way or another on their Spanish speaking neighbor. I'm thinking No War on Drugs and maybe a an influx of Spanish republicans from Mexico could help Mexico with some reform policies and whatnot. I could see alot of northern Mexico becoming prime real estate for solar farms. This along with social policies would help alot.
 
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