Latin America invests about 2% of GDP on infrastructure. Between 1992 and 2011 China invested an average of 8.5% of GDP in infrastructure per year. Given the demonstrated effects of infrastructure on development and poverty reduction, it’s time for the region to make a concerted effort to attract foreign investors.
India is looking to adopt Latin America’s famous and popular conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs. But are they transferable to a country of 1.2 billion people, in which 363 million of them live below the poverty line, 260 million live in rural areas?
A snapshot of the World Bank’s data on financial inclusion in Latin America.
When analyzing Latin America, it is high time we stopped using the imagery of a “pink tide” and stop depicting the region in “good lefts” or “bad lefts.” Despite the rhetoric we often hear from politicians and pundits alike, with few exceptions we are entering an era of pragmatism and centrism.
Today we have a real opportunity to assess how southern regionalism become political spaces where policies are redefined and the norms of global political economy can be renegotiated.
Si bien la gente aparece molesta con los escándalos de corrupción, estos escándalos no son peores que otros problemas de tráfico de influencias y conflictos de interés que surgieron en años recientes. La diferencia ahora está en que la economía ya no crece.
Given the advances women have already made, a legal change to increase fathers’ roles in the home and thereby free up women to return to their careers offers a powerful means to helping women overcome the barriers to upper level career advancement.
Given Latin America’s woefully inadequate infrastructure, China’s plans to invest in roads and rails is a welcome opportunity. The question becomes, though, under what conditions for bidding and procurement and the protections for community land rights.
The story of dashed hopes and sudden halts is a painful yet familiar one for all of us. As we lick our wounds and take stock of yet another lost opportunity, we ask ourselves yet again: can the continent ever escape the boom-bust cycles that have left our economies trapped in middle income status?
The TransPacific Partnership that is currently being negotiated will be neither an apocalypse nor a panacea. But what it will do is provide critical legal and institutional guarantees that will draw Asian investors to Latin America.
