South America

Developments in Venezuela since the presidential election of July 28, 2024, epitomize the fault lines of contemporary world politics. The elections failed to clarify the political situation in Venezuela. Instead, they complicated it. The official electoral authority declared Mr. Nicolás Maduro the official winner of the elections, with a narrow but comfortable margin, while the opposition also declared its candidate, Mr. Edmundo González Urrutia, the legitimate winner of the elect ...

This study quantifies the contributions of Brazil’s blue economy and explores the economic interdependence between coastal and hinterland regions through interregional linkages. Employing a multi-level approach, we analyze municipality and state-level data on oceanrelated activities. Using an interstate input-output model, we estimate the value chains of the blue economy, offering a deeper understanding of its systemic impacts. This study addresses gaps in national, regional, and lo ...

Millions are severely malnourished in a world where there is enough for all. Hunger and malnutrition stalk more than 3.1 billion people. Yet, widespread hunger in all its forms is a problem which has been largely solved at the macro level in today’s high-income, industrialized countries. Their “escape from hunger and premature death” is a fairly recent phenomenon. It began around 300 years ago, continued for most of the 20th century and is still ongoing today. The problems faced by ...

Venezuela holds crucial presidential elections on July 28. The results might substantially alter the political system in that country, since, for the first time since 1998, the opposition candidate has a clear chance of winning the vote. Why has the opposition been unable to win elections in that country for almost three decades now? And why is it on the verge of winning elections this time? What is the international dimension of this electoral process? How might it impact Morocco? ...

In January 2024, gunmen invaded a TV studio in Ecuador, seized journalists and staff as hostages, and interrupted the regular programs. That episode highlighted the rise of violence in Ecuador, a country that was until very recently calm and peaceful. In this paper, I place the rise of violence in Ecuador within the context of what some refer to as the endemic violence in Latin America. I explore its risks, consequences, and the ways it could be tackled. I also emphasize some of the ...

This paper was originally published in nature.com   Deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon remains a challenge due to its detrimental effects on ecosystems and the associated increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Such deforestation can be driven by foreign demand in terms of international exports, as well as domestic demand. However, most efforts to quantify the associations between consumer markets and deforestation mainly consider international exports rather than domestic ...

This paper examines Brazil's economic growth patterns over the last three decades and identifies a missed opportunity for the country to attain high-income status by the mid-2010s. Instead, Brazil has suffered from low productivity growth, and has made little progress in transforming its production and export structures in favor of higher value-added activities. This premature de-industrialization makes it challenging for Brazil to transition from its long- standing upper-middle-inc ...

- Brazil’s latest tax reform will replace five taxes on consumption with one single VAT to promote greater efficiency and sectoral isonomy. - Forecasts produced by a detailed ICGE model point to sizeable gains in GDP exceeding 4% in the long run, even if spatially unequal. - Exceptions to the rules reduce potential benefits in efficiency terms. - Policies meant to promote regional development and close the gap deepened by the reform partially achieve their goal at the expense of ...

This Paper was originally published on onlinelibrary.wiley.com   This study aims to shed new empirical light on the importance of the wage curve in a developing economy. The main contribution to the empirical literature is related to the analysis being conducted at different regional levels of a developing economy. This indicates that municipal-level data seems to be more adequate for wage curve evaluation, and that spatial dependency should be considered to adequately control for ...

The Brazilian economy is stuck in a so-called middle-income trap—growth that stalled long before Brazil caught up with the living standards of the highly industrialized countries. After exhibiting a stellar performance in the decades before the 1980s, the economy has since been unable to sustain growth for long periods. The predicament can be summarized using a medical analogy: Brazil has been suffering from both productivity anemia and public sector bloat. On the one hand, it hasn ...

The surprising victory of Javier Milei, the unconventional ‘anarcho-capitalist’ candidate, in the August primaries ahead of Argentina’s October 2023 general election, can be largely credited to his commitment to dollarize the Argentine economy, a move perceived as the ultimate solution to bring an end to the nation's economic turmoil. The potential shift from the local currency to the dollar has sparked concerns about Argentina's bilateral currency swap line with China. This swap l ...

Marianna Albuquerque and Santiago Theoduloz are 2022 alumni of Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders program. Learn more about Marianna here and Santiago here.  From our experience of participating in the ADEL Program and the Atlantic Dialogues in 2022, we learned that the Atlantic countries have the potential to improve their economies through regional coordination. This led us to reflect on how many opportunities the countries from the wider Atlantic missed out on by not considerin ...

This Paper was originally published on agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com   Water plays a central role in several socioeconomic and environmental nexuses. Faced with various anthropogenic pressures that act as water scarcity drivers and knowing that the unavailability of water can be a limiting factor for economic development, there is an urgent need for the design and evaluation of economic instruments that help in the management of water resources. This article presents a proposal ...

This report is part of a partnership between the Policy Center for the New South and the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.   The creative economy is a constantly evolving activity, driven by the cultural industries, which make up a large and interconnected sector. Arts and culture impact the creative economy in major areas: education, innovation, collaboration, and clustering. The cultural industries are one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the global economy. This sector is ...

This Book was originally published on springer.com   This book examines regional structural challenges on Colombia’s path to sustainable social cohesion and regionally inclusive growth. These challenges can be divided into three main groups: (i) those that focus on competitiveness and the supply side, (ii) those that arise from critical business cycle issues on the demand side, and (iii) those concerning environmental sustainability, employment and social inclusion.  The contribu ...

At the August 22-24 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa said they wanted to use more of their national currencies for cross-border payments, which are currently dominated by the U.S. dollar and other global convertible currencies. Like China and the other BRICS, several other countries have also sought to develop alternative external payment mechanisms. Pairs of countries have agreed to settle commercial and financial transactio ...

Le 22-24 août 2023, à Johannesburg, en Afrique du Sud, se réunit le 15ème sommet des BRICS. Ce sommet est particulièrement intéressant pour deux raisons : il est, d’abord, le premier sommet en présentiel depuis la pandémie de la Covid, et en pleine guerre russo-ukrainienne qui perdure, et il l’est, ensuite, du fait de son ordre du jour consacré en partie à l’adhésion de nouveaux pays et à l’instauration d’une éventuelle monnaie commune. L’objet de cette étude lui est consacré. Rappe ...

This policy brief was originally published on T20 India website   Supportive policies for tropical agriculture have helped millions of small-scale farmers in Brazil step out of poverty by improving government capacity to design legal frameworks to strengthen agricultural production and family farming. Scientific and technological developments have enabled small-scale Brazilian farmers to produce food while considering local tropical conditions. In contrast, tropical agriculture s ...

L’océan Atlantique, dans sa partie sud, qui demeure un espace géopolitique inexploité, peut servir de nouvelle plateforme de dialogue entre le Nord et le Sud. Le Royaume du Maroc, stratégiquement placé dans cet espace, peut exploiter sa façade atlantique afin d’insuffler une nouvelle dynamique à sa relation avec l’Amérique latine pour le renforcement des échanges politiques et économiques dans le sud global. Les relations entre le Maroc et les pays de l’Amérique latine c ...

This paper aims to investigate the impact of an inflation targeting framework adoption by the central bank, on the reduction of public debt ratios in emerging countries, through the potential discipline-enhancing effect of inflation targeting on the conduct of fiscal policy in general. The impact evaluation method used is the Propensity Score Matching (PSM), which allows the evaluation of the treatment effect of inflation targeting on fiscal discipline, in terms of public debt reduc ...