ANDRES OPPENHEIMER S. America can learn from China

One point that went almost unnoticed during Chinese President Hu Jintao's triumphal visit to Latin America last week: While China is embarked on what may be the most dramatic privatization drive in the history of man-kind, Latin America seems to be going in the opposite direction.
Hu's 12-day visit to Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Cuba, in which he suggested his country may invest up to $100 billion in the region over the next decade, drew regional attention to China's phenomenal 9 percent annual economic growth rates.
South American officials seemed mesmerized by China's meteoric rise to a world economic power that is promising massive investments in Latin America.
But many Wall Street economists and international development experts were amazed by the fact that very few Latin American opinion makers seem to be drawing any lessons from China's economic success story. They point to the most recent headlines from the region:
UIn Argentina, the government of President Nestor Kirchner earlier this month signed into law the creation of the Enarsa energy firm, the first state-owned company born in that country since 1967. In addition, the government recently took over the financially troubled Correos Argentinos mail company and the Lafsa airline.
UIn Uruguay, a plebiscite to reverse the privatization of the country's water services, won by a landslide in the Oct. 31 national election won by leftist President-elect Tabare Vasquez. Under the new constitutional amendment, all future water companies must be state-owned.
UIn Bolivia, voters in July approved a government-backed referendum that called for a new oil-and-gas law that increases taxes on gas companies and gives the state a greater say in the industry. Some energy companies claim that a gas bill approved by Congress last week comes close to a renationalization of Bolivia's energy industry.
UIn Venezuela, the government has completely taken over management of the state-owned PDVSA oil monopoly, which used to be run as an independent agency. Plans to open up PDVSA to partnerships with foreign companies have lost momentum.
UIn Brazil, efforts to move toward privatization of the state-owned Electronorte and Chesf electricity generating companies are stalled. In Mexico, similar efforts to open up parts of the state-owned Pemex oil monopoly to the private sector have also fizzled.
UIn Cuba, the government last month froze issuance of new licenses for 40 job categories, including magicians for children's parties, computer programmers and television antenna repairmen. Cuba's private sector of 150,000 self-employed people, which represented 2.1 percent of the impoverished island's work force, is thus expected to shrink further.
By comparison, China's nominally communist government has recently opened up to the private sector the country's two biggest telecommunications companies, China Telecom and China Unicom.
China has already fired millions of people in recent years to streamline state companies, or to make them easier to sell to foreign investors.
Most of the country's 100,000 state enterprises are expected to be opened up to the private sector or completely privatized before the end of this decade.
Granted, China is the darling of international investors because it is coming from a state-controlled economy, while many Latin American countries seem to be swimming against the current because they are taking measures to correct privatizations that went wrong during their often clumsy economic openings of the 1990s.
In practical terms, China is still a more closed economy than those of most Latin American countries, although that may be changing fast.
The fact is, China's economic opening is attracting almost as much foreign investment as all of Latin America and the Caribbean combined.
My conclusion: The good news is that some of the left-of-center governments that welcomed Hu last week, such as Brazil's, are turning out to be much more responsible than pessimists predicted a few years ago. This will help create economic stability in the region, a key condition for new investments and more jobs.
But unless Latin Americans take a closer look at what is happening elsewhere in the world, they are not going to get out of their current stagnation.
X Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.