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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
Pacific Alliance fever has set in. This trade grouping—which joins together the economies of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru—is holding its seventh summit on Thursday in the western Colombian city of Cali with more and more attention being paid throughout the region. The alliance has been lauded as “the most exciting thing going on today [...]
Hugo Chavez, fiery leader of Venezuela since he took power in a 1999 coup, architect of the 21st century socialism model and dreamer of a united Bolivarian front of South American nations died on March 5 in Caracas. What has been his legacy for Venezuela and the Latin American region? For Venezuela, Chavez’s fourteen years [...]
Today, July 31, 2012, Venezuela officially becomes a full member of the Mercosur customs union. But Venezuela’s accession—nearly a decade in the making—effectively puts to rest the pretense of Mercosur as a serious economic integration arrangement. Mercosur, the acronym for the Common Market of the Southern Cone, started promisingly enough, a political triumph of cooperation [...]
Adam Thomson, in the Financial Times on July 10, writes of the coup in Honduras as an echo of 1980s violence in Central America. But, in fact, the past is not as distant as much of the coverage of the coup suggests and the seemingly forgotten autogolpe, or “self coup” in Guatemala in 1993 may [...]
It should come as no surprise that Ecuador has become the first Latin American country—and the second country after the Seychelles—to default on its debt since the start of the current financial crisis. In market terms the default, which occurred on December 12, is not a big deal. Ecuador’s debt totals no more than $3.9 [...]