Economy of Gran Altiplano

The Altiplanero economy, which operates according to broad market-socialist socialist principles, has been one of the most consistently-growing economies in the world. From the "economic renaissance" (Hyspanic: Renacimiento económico) of the early 1980s, when production across most sectors was first reorganised under Juan Armando Gutiérrez's Commissariat for Economic Equality (Hyspanic: Comisaría para la Igualdad Económica), often shortened to Comeconóm, average growth has been between 4 and 7%, year-on-year, despite faltering during the latter half of the nineties, following the Santander Crisis in 2003, and during the HECO-CODEX confrontation in 2010. Despite the extensive planning apparatus present in the nascency of the state, the modern Altiplanero economy features comparatively limited centralised allocative and price controls, as successive governments have moved towards a market-based model in most non-primary sectors. Nonetheless, it is estimated that some 8 per cent of GDP is generated by the informal sector, and persistent efforts by the government in Altamira to better regulate this portion of the labour market have largely proven unsuccessful. Studies by the Labour Protection Division of CBRD, the Higher Institute of Economic Theory in Akylaren, and at least one Sahilese research team found few links between persistent poverty in Gran Altiplano and the informal labour force, much of which is organised along collective lines, both in urban and rural environments. The country remains a net exporter: a diversified agricultural sector, growing ICT sector, and heavy-industrial export base, particularly in nuclear engineering, mining, and maritime industries have survived the transition to a twenty-first-century service economy.

Gran Altiplano is a member of both the CODEX-affiliated Insert FTA here and the Global South Fair Trade Partnership, which it founded in 2006 alongside Sahil and. It maintains additional bilateral trade agreements with Hyspania, Chisei, and the other Valeyan regional powers, Transoxthraxia and Achtotlan; the latter two have broadened in scope over the last fifteen years, and have proven a source of contention amongst economists and ideologues alike.

Prior to 1977
The pre-unification economies of the South Valeyan Hyspanic states were substantially different from one another; nonetheless regional trade was fairly limited, both because of varying dates of independence from the Hyspanic Empire and fierce regional rivalries, particularly between Catamarca and Averillas. Altiplano engaged in substantial trade with all of the coastal states save Roblemar, but its economy remained relatively undiversified and heavily dependent on natural resource endowments, particularly, coal, copper, and later aluminium. Porto Serra featured an almost exclusively agricultural, plantation-based economy, producing substantial amounts of banana, sugar, cocoa, and coffee for export purposes.

In Catamarca, the industrial base was characterised by large, vertically-integrated conglomerates, which were run by members of the country's nobility (many of whom had received hereditary titles after success as industrialists). Some, such as the National Yards at Tres Puentes, were also substantially tied to the military, and thus conversely exercised not-insignificant influence on government labour laws. While these guaranteed basic social protections and carried a prohibition on child labour (below the age of sixteen) in certain conditions, harsh anti-union laws made legal action tremendously difficult.

[more later, this isn't the most important part lmao, except for the bits on Altiplano's economics]

1977-1992
The principal practical challenge facing the Marchists was the integration of five completely distinct economies without a complete collapse of either the internal market or the balance of trade. Leading economists and politicians saw quickly the need to modernise transportation infrastructure before all else, as connectivity was poor in many regions and nonexistent altogether in others, and this would require substantial capital and technical expertise that no one in the five provinces possessed. This, coupled with highly visible inequality in most regions and the substantial war chest amassed through the nationalisation of assets belonging to former nobles and industrialists who had fled the country during the March Revolution, underscored the need for rapid standardisation of regulation, labour organisation, and the establishment of a common internal market. Áviles himself was a strong proponent of a fully centrally planned economy, believing this was the only way to ensure that economic inequality did not return: other leading revolutionaries, most notably Juan Armando Gutiérrez, disagreed, favouring a model based on empowering labour's role in production and investment. The work of early-20th-century Altiplanero economist was instrumental in the eventual establishment of the Commissariat for Economic Equality in 1980, which Gutiérrez would head for more than a decade. Alongside its sister bureau, the Commissariat for National Integration (which was folded into Comeconóm in 1991 after the conclusion of the Second Five-Year Plan), this was the central planning agency for the Altiplanero state.

While the stated intention of Áviles was to eventually extend planning to the entire economy, according to Gutiérrez in his 2005 memoir The Path to a Common Future (Hyspanic: El sendero a un futuro común), this was never practically discussed within Comeconóm. Rather, central planning's primary goal was to ensure the continued solvency and modernisation of primary export and defence-critical sectors: agriculture, transportation, mining, nuclear energy, communications, shipbuilding, and arms manufacture, among others. This enabled the financial sector to operate with less regulation, making the country a more attractive climate for targeted FDI, while enabling the PPA to please the bulk of its voter base via social dividends, with the state covering most costs of modernisation and letting the labour force reap the benefits. It has been suggested by von Hirsch and Jensen (2009) that as the initial sovereign-wealth fund created during the Revolution was invested, the PPA backed away from further centralisation to avoid more substantial deficit spending as it also focused on military build-up.

Nonetheless, the primary mechanism of the Altiplanero economy was communication between Comeconóm and individual enterprises, mediated regionally by department- and municipality-level councils, or juntas. Using modelling processes run on imported supercomputers from OTHER ORDIC STATE, planners in Puerto Yunque established baseline input and primary-commodity prices for the year on the internal market as well as a three-month forecast, which was then distributed through the new national network to enterprises. Working from this data, enterprises established both a cost-minimisation production plan and estimated demand figures, which were relayed back to Comeconóm. This process would be repeated quarterly, with course corrections at monthly or biweekly intervals. Practically, while input costs were fairly well standardised across the country, costs of production were substantially higher in the north, which in turn led to reduced profits and social dividends there. This persistent geographical inequality proved to be another reason for the eventual transfer of a number of planning functions to province-level governments.

For a time, officials debated abolishing physical currency completely domestically, instead moving to a pure-credit system to aid in accounting and help track domestic private indebtedness. The proposal steadily lost traction, however, as it became increasingly difficult to regulate investment of funds between planned and non-planned sectors, and Comeconóm and Comintenáz shied away from regulating the growing financial sector more heavily, as it provided much-needed investment capital in sums the government was not prepared to borrow. The escudo was introduced as a unified national currency in 1982, and was maintained at a managed float for the next two decades before the 2004 market and macroeconomic reforms.