Since I linked earlier to a post arguing that the Chinese currency seemed not that undervalued based on Balassa-Samuelson considerations involving the relative prices of traded and nontraded goods, thought I should link to Paul Krugman's fairly persuasive counterargument---which is basically, look at their current account surplus: they're exporting savings.  Here's his op-ed on the subject.

For anyone who completely buys the story that the Chicago-boys free market policies did wonders for Chile, Paul Krugman has an interesting twist.  Look at his graph; it really jumps out that citing historical growth rates to make points about the effects of economic policies can be hugely affected by where you choose your endpoints.  As reference points, Socialist Salvador Allende became president of Chile on November 3, 1970, and was killed in a right-wing coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, on September 11th, 1973.  You can see in Krugman's graph that Chilean GDP, which had declined roughly 10% under Allende, continued to drop another 14 percentage points below its 1970 baseline, in the first year after the coup.  After poking above that baseline in 1980 and 1981, it dropped as part of the general Latin American debt and economic crisis (which I view as associated with global effects of the US inflation-fighting tight-money recession induced by the Federal Reserve board and its chair Paul Volcker at the end of the Jimmy Carter years) and didn't reach 1970 levels again until 1988.  In 1988, voters rejected the prospect of eight more years of Pinochet in a plebiscite, leading to negotiations and elections in 1989 resulting in Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin taking over the presidency.

Perhaps part of the continued (and even greater!) decline of GDP per capita under the first year of the Pinochet dictatorship can be laid to the continuing effects of the chaos of the Allende years (which in turn, some attribute partly to right-wing "economic sabotage" though I'd guess it had more to do with Allende's policies).  But the rapid recovery from the trough reached in 1975 can hardly be viewed primarily as testimony to Chicago-boys-style ultra-free-market policies:  it was probably in large part recovery from an economic crisis, to a point where resources were again fully employed, though presumably having a functioning market economy---whether Friedmanite or just run-of-the-mill-liberal-democratic--played a crucial role.  The whole business of just what the caused of the economic chaos in the second half of the Allende administration is interesting and important, and I'm not an expert here.  I think hugely stimulative monetary policy, leading to inflation, was an important factor.  Capital flight may have been another.

I think the fact that "Chile was hit much worse than the other major players" in the early-1980s Latin American economic crisis is linked to another historical point Krugman recently reminded us of.  Many of us remember the 1996 Asian financial crisis, which I view as having been, let us say, not helped by the Clinton-era crew of economists and Goldman-Sachs-linked financial types promoting financial market liberalization in Asia.  Malaysian dictator Mahathir imposed controls on the flow of capital out of the country, after the crisis hit, and was excoriated for it by many of these same liberalization-promoting types, but they worked and the Malaysian currency and economy weren't hit as badly as predicted, and as many other countries were.  Chile had some of the most liberal capital-flow regulations in Latin America at the time of the early-1980s economic crisis, and I believe this is generally viewed as part of the explanation why it was among the worst hit.  Indeed, I think the episode is one of the things that led the IMF to reconsider its position on capital flow regulation.