The flurry of reform continues in Mexico. On Wednesday, President Enrique Pena Nieto announced plans to ease the flow of credit to small businesses.
Mexico’s sky-high interest rates have long kept small businesses from growing, driven entrepreneurs into the informal economy, and pushed many Mexicans to illegally immigrate to the United …
Economic Comission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) recently published its growth forecasts for Latin America’s economies in 2013. With a few exceptions, the news is disappointing. The 3.5 percent projected growth for Latin America’s economy is slightly above last year’s rate, but well below the 5 percent clip …
Brazil’s economy has turned tepid. Last year growth was one perccent, the lowest rate of any major emerging economy. Mexico is now Latin America’s growth darling. Meanwhile Sao Paulo’s jetsetters are squirreling away their savings in Miami real estate, a trend that perhaps has less to …
President Enrique Peña Nieto has mounted an assault against Mexico’s entrenched monopolies over the past two months. He first took on the teachers union, then the telecoms, explaining his aim was to “transform the country, not just to run it.” Where’s this going? As noted by the Financial Times, the …
Among the more important questions to surface in the wake of Hugo Chávez’s death on March 5: Will chavismo survive? The answer, usually given in the affirmative, frequently invokes a previous era of Latin American history.
For example, a column on the London Review of Book’s website, “Chavez Hasta …
Hugo Chavez should be officially sworn into office on January 10. But with Chavez’s advanced cancer and his recently announced “complications,” it is unclear who will lead the country in 2013. Here is a brief primer.
As Tim Padgett recently argued, Venezuela’s Bolivarian constitution provides a “murky map” on matters of …
Last week, a U.N. tribunal ordered the release of an Argentine frigate docked in Ghana since October, when a group of hedge funds succeeded in getting a local court to hold the ship as collateral until the Argentine government made good on a $20 million bond. The bond, …
Barack Obama’s reelection has stirred policy reactions in Mexico in at least two ways. First, voters in the states of Colorado and Washington endorsed ballot measures to legalize recreational use of marijuana. One would expect the next issue up for discussion to be the legal conflicts involving interstate commerce and, …
In 1971 Stafford Beer, a renowned British academic, proposed to make Chile the world’s first cybernetic country. In essence, this meant that Chile’s entire economy would be run by a centralized computer network; real time data from hundreds of public utilities, banks, and industrial manufacturers would be rendered into optimal …
A small domestic market and stiff bankruptcy penalties make Chile an unlikely hotspot for aspiring entrepreneurs. Yet “Chilicon Valley” has swelled to more than 500 tech start-ups since 2010, including Kwelia.com, which makes software for landlords, and Kedzoh, which allows employers to send out instructional videos to workers …
Mexico has come in for positive news of late, thanks in part to a forecast published by Nomura Securities that showed Mexico surpassing Brazil as Latin America’s largest economy by 2022. While that’s certainly possible, a more realistic scenario would involve Mexico growing at the upper end of …
There were 48 homicides in Cuidad Juarez in July, according to the Washington Post: “33 by gun, seven by beatings, six by strangulation and two by knife.”
Forty of the murders are attributed to drug violence. Bad as that sounds, it represents a 70% reduction in the number of …
In the 1980s, Japanese carmakers began to move production to the United States. Today, they — along with German and South Korean makers — account for more than 40% of the autos made in the United States. The move begs a question, taken up by a recent New …
The Washington Post’s Juan Forero recently published an article on the erosion of democratic institutions in Latin America. Among the “new authoritarians” he cites as responsible for the decline are Hugo Chavez and several of his key allies, namely Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Nicaragua’s Daniel …
Recently, the general gloom about Mexico has been replaced by a bit of positive reportage. Mexico’s economy grew faster than Brazil’s last year, and it is set to do so again in 2012.
Largely, that’s because NAFTA is once again paying dividends for Mexico. Higher wages in China and volatile transport costs have …
