Latin America

This article is a qualitative, inductive interpretive and reasoning. Results were achieved through a multiple-methods approach, combining archival research with the descriptive, single case study, which unit of analysis is the civil airport network in Brazil (Yin, 1988). The sample was investigated in the IATA (2019) database regarding the N=10 busiest airports in Latin America, from 2014 to 2018, and the ten busiest airports worldwide.

This paper analyzes recent trends of Latin America’s institutional development regarding investor protection. In spite of the underdevelopment of the region’s financial markets, there is slow movement towards legal reforms intended to protect investors and make regional markets more attractive to investors; current inadequacies in the region’s legal institution’s generate high levels of ownership concentration, poor access to external equity financing, and narrow equity markets. The evidence in this paper, based on firm-level data for six countries, shows that, like legal protection of investors, appropriate firm-level corporate governance is linked to lower costs for capital, better valuation, performance, and dividend payments across countries. Firms can compensate for their countries’ legal deficiencies by distinguishing themselves through improved corporate governance practices, thus increasing transparency and limiting potential conflict between large and minority shareholders. Firms can additionally look for capital by issuing ADRs, as they have in recent years, although this practice undermines local capital markets. In the end, firms and regulators must improve their governance structures and shareholder protections if they are to meet the improved benchmarks of developed nations brought about by Asian, European, and U.S. scandals in recent years.

Still, why is it that Latin America received mainly portfolio flows while other emerging markets, such as the Asian crisis countries, received mainly bank loans? Here we venture to suggest one factor that may have been relevant: the creation of a secondary market for sovereign bonds in Latin America as a result of the Brady bond exchange. An unexpected silver lining of the Brady debt reduction, which mostly focused on Latin America, was the creation for the first time of a mass of long-term bonds that needed to be managed and traded. The creation of this market allowed high-risk portfolios to include Latin American risk and made it worthwhile to invest in acquiring information about Latin American markets, which ratcheted up investors’ interest in the region once they became familiar with it. 12

The news media have always been considered an essential pillar of liberal democracy: the fourth estate. It is not a coincidence that this fourth estate underpinned the transition from authoritarian rule to liberal democracy that took place in Latin America and central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during the 1980s and 1990s. 1 In both transitional processes, the emerging political forces saw an opportunity in the media to connect with a volatile and depoliticized citizenry, replacing the old discredited pillars of society (whether unions, the military, or the church) and progressively building a new hegemony. However, the influence of the media in guiding and strengthening these transitional democracies still remains unclear today. Currently, the idea of an inherently democratizing media holds little weight, as young democratic institutions are often too weak and volatile. 2,3,4 Inadequate regulation,

Basic Document on the Relations of the European Union with Latin America and the Caribbean 3 Europe and Latin America: A Partnership for Action by the Institute for European-Latin Americ[r]

The application here is on Latin America, where income inequality has been falling during the last decades. Following the insights given by the theoretical models, a decline in the dispersion of parental investment in children’s human capital should be expected as well (ceteris paribus), and younger genera- tions should display higher intergenerational mobility. However, parental investment is only one aspect. Indeed, it has to be taken into account that the interplay between three institutions determines the amount of intergenerational mobility in a society: The family, the market, and the state (Corak, 2013b). The family, mainly due to the inheritance of endowments from parents to children, for example trough invest- ments in human capital, genetic transmission of abilities, or the heritage of certain values. 9 On the latter, empirical research found for example a positive association between income inequality and stronger work ethic (Corneo and Neher, 2013) what might lead to higher intergenerational mobility. 10 The market, since higher returns to investment in human capital might act as an incentive for families to invest more and, thus, raise mobility (Solon, 2014). The state, providing public investment in human capital for families that cannot afford an efficient amount of it due to budget constrains (Davies et al., 2005). Additionally on this last point, Ichino et al. (2011) argue that political institutions influence strongly the degree of persistence of socioeconomic status in a society and are one of the main explanations of cross-country differences in intergenerational mobility estimates.

As a consequence, in some dependent economies—among these, the so called ‘developing countries’ of Latin America—foreign investment no longer remains a simple zero-sum game of exploitation as was the pattern in classical imperialism. Strictly speaking—if we consider the purely economic indicators—it is not difficult to show that develop- ment and monopoly penetration in the industrial sectors of dependent economies are not incompatible. The idea that there occurs a kind of development of underdevelopment, apart from the play on words, is not helpful. In fact, dependency, monopoly capitalism and development are not contradictory terms: there occurs a kind of dependent capitalist develop- ment in the sectors of the Third World integrated into the new forms of monopolistic expansion.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 develops a neoclassical model for orga- nizing our investigation. Section 3 compares Latin America’s output to that in Europe and East Asia. Section 4 decomposes Latin American output into its labor productivity and em- ployment components and investigates the source of low Latin American labor productivity. Section 5 quantifies how much of Latin America’s TFP gap can be accounted for by human capital. Section 6 discusses theoretical models in which competitive barriers lead to low pro- ductivity. Section 7 documents that Latin America has erected a number of domestic and international barriers to competition that significantly exceed competitive barriers in either Europe or East Asia. Section 8 presents a number of empirical microeconomic cases that document how government policies that limit competition have significantly reduced TFP in some Latin American countries. Section 9 concludes.

Only papers on prevalence of ROP are included in Table 1. Papers concerning aspects of ROP other than prevalence were included to collect data on guidelines and neonatal care procedures that could affect the prevalence of ROP in these countries, but are not included in Table 1. Use of different inclusion criteria for patients in the screening programs performed in several Latin American countries, as well as in the reviewed studies, limited any comparative analysis of the published data. Most studies provided insufficient data to enable detailed analysis of the prevalence of ROP in the region. The studies also failed to provide adequate information to determine if the prevalence of ROP is decreasing in Latin America.

In the words of the coordinators of this GDN project, “it is technically complicated to measure reform policies and outcome.” In order to get a general sense of what has happened in Latin America, we use one of the most comprehensive attempts at measuring reforms, by Eduardo Lora and collaborators at the Inter-American Development Bank. Lora (1997 and 2001) has built an index to measure reform advances; the index is composed by a set of sub-indexes which capture five reform areas throughout 19 Latin American countries for the 1985-1999 period (the areas covered are trade, tax, financial, privatizations and labor reform). Figure 1 shows the path of the Lora index of reform for our 8 Latin American cases in comparison to the regional average. It is evident that the average of the index for Latin American countries as a whole growths considerably throughout the period. Comparing across countries, 7 we can see the persistent and always consistent march of Chile, the explosive trajectory followed by Argentina and Peru (see the big-bang behavior between 1990 and 1995 in both indexes), and the smoother path of the Mexican, Brazilian and Uruguayan cases throughout their series.

Innovation Surveys in Latin American started more than ten years ago. Initially based on the Oslo Manual, adapted to better suit the characteristics of innovation and technology diffusion in Latin American countries, the Bogota Manual (RICyT, 2001) did later formulate a set of methodological guidelines that were followed by many of the countries in the region (Sutz, 2000). As of today, 15 Latin American countries have carried out a total of 46 innovation surveys, and Latin America does now stand out as the region with the most active innovation survey data production within the developing world (Marins, 2011). This short article provides a primer to innovation surveys in Latin America, listing the available data, some key institutional and scholarly references available on the web, and briefly pointing to some methodological issues and challenges for future improvements.

Historically, organic agriculture has had most of its support from NGOs, which have been trying to change the social, economic and environmental scenario the Latin America coun- tries in the last 20 years. In recognition of the growing importance of the organic sector to Latin America’s agricultural economy, the governmental institutions have begun to take steps towards increasing involvement and governments are beginning to play a central role in the promotion of organic agriculture. There are various types of support in the Latin American countries (see also country reports), from the promotion of organic agriculture to market access support (through official export agencies). In some countries, there has been support to pay certification cost during the first years of conversion or other financial sup- port through different governmental programs. An important process occurring now in many Latin America countries is that organic laws are been established in order to set stan- dards regarding the regulation and promotion of the organic sector.

The main reason is that the patterns of change in the reproductive behaviour in Latin America continue to differ markedly from other world regions. First, in spite of high CPRs, the region is characterized by one of the highest levels of unintended motherhood in the world (Bearak et al. 2018; Sedgh, Singh, and Hussain 2014). In countries for which the estimates exist, around half the births are reported as unintended (Measure DHS 2018). This indicates that the family planning programmes’ efforts did not eliminate the unmet need for contraception and that it is still important to identify areas for improvements in the provision of contraceptive services. Second, despite relatively low levels of fertility, Latin America is characterized by exceptionally high levels of teenage childbearing (Rodríguez 2013). While women with low socioeconomic status continue to enter motherhood very early in life, the signs of motherhood postponement have been emerging among higher socioeconomic strata in several countries (ECLAC 2005, 2011; Rosero- Bixby, Castro-Martín, and Martín-García 2009). This pattern of increasing polarization in motherhood timing between the population groups remains poorly understood. Lastly, the TFRs have recently declined to the below-replacement level in a number of countries in the region (United Nations 2017). Whether the continuation of this process can be expected remains unclear. This is particularly puzzling as the pattern of childbearing timing in Latin

This time the policy stance has been very different in Latin America. The fact that many governments increased their indebtedness in recent years but not as fast as their revenues and GDP, and that as pointed out previously many were also able to switch from debts denominated in foreign currencies to obligations in their local currency, meant that they now had some degrees of freedom to engage in deficit spending (see figures 4 and 5). 8 Some 18 governments have put in place fiscal stimulus packages involving mainly additional housing and infrastructure outlays, cash transfers to the poor or unemployed, cuts in personal or corporate income taxes, and loans and guarantees as Brazil, for example, has done through its state-owned development bank (ECLAC, 2009a). And yet, the cost of the policy measures likely to be implemented appears relatively modest, in large measure because there has been no need to bail out bank depositors and other creditors – bailouts which in past financial crises have entailed huge commitments of public funds, as we are witnessing at present also in Europe and the United States. The spending involved is being comfortably financed by loans from multilateral agencies, draw-downs from accumulated fiscal savings, and from borrowing in the domestic or international capital markets.

Shifting the attention to individual-specific variables, we are able to evaluate drivers of intra-household technology diffusion. As expected, education is the main driver of the Internet use conditional on access, being positive and significant in all regressions. Also the student condition dummy is positive and significant, except in the case of Paraguay. It shows the importance of the contribution of schools to technology diffusion not only as a mere access point. Additionally, it is important to notice the statistical evidence of an age and gender gap in the households (except for El Salvador where the coefficient of the Female dummy is not significant). It means that young people and males are more likely to use the Internet than older and females, even when access is provided. Analyzing marginal effects, it is possible to notice that even in those countries with better economic conditions and broader technology diffusion, the Internet gender gap remains strong. Given Internet access at home, women are, on average and ceteris paribus 10.4% less likely to use Internet at home in Brazil, 10.0% less in Mexico, 6.7% less in Costa Rica, 6.4% less in Chile. With regard to the existence of such gender gap, a possible explanation could refer to women’s role in Latin American societies. Several social studies evaluating work division between genders in Latin America attribute to women activities of reproductive labor and care economy. 15 Moreover, researches based

Figure 11 shows the different margins of the export diversification by using the Theil Index. As we can see, the low diversification degree is mainly explained by the intensive margin, or in others words, the main export concentration is explained by the low distribution of the total value of exports over all the active lines. The extensive margin is less relative to the export concentration in Latin America. According to these results, increasing the number of active lines of the export is not necessarily the main concern. Nevertheless, we can appreciate differences between countries in both margins. At the intensive margin the conclusions made with the HHI remain, but at the extensive margin we can see that Bolivia, Panama and Paraguay still have potential to increase the numbers of exports groups.

negotiators involved will have to make trade-offs in agriculture, which is essential for Mercosur and for the WTO (Article XXIV of the GATT). The agreement should include, in essence, all trade between the parties. The key to success will lie in the well-understood interest of agri-food trade, with Europeans increasingly specialising in the production and export of quality food products with high added value. In addition, European agribusiness firms are investing in Mercosur to export to third markets in Latin America and North America, especially if the FTAA is to open these markets in the near future. A possible negotiating tactic could be that of progress in stages, in order to keep pace with possible developments in the WTO, and especially with those in the FTAA. Indeed, we must rely on the activism of the Bush Administration not to be overtaken by Europeans in countries that the United States has always considered as their reserved stronghold. Mercosur’s ambition has no geographic boundaries, as they also aim for free trade agreements with South Africa and the countries of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).

A growing number of developing countries attract FDI inflows, which enhance their financial growth, the macroeconomic stability, the governmental policy and infrastructure (Metaxas & Kechagia, 2016). Over the past years the Latin American and the Caribbean countries have attracted a significant amount of FDI inflow, taking into consideration the economic problems observed worldwide because of the financial crisis (Olapido, 2013). As a result, the countries of the region increased the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), achieved economic growth and reduced poverty rates. Moreover, during the period 1980 – 2010 there has been observed a positive relation between FDI and economic growth in a sample of six Latin American countries (Anaya & Alvaro, 2012). In addition, FDI inflows from foreign investors in Latin America were not affected significantly because of the recent financial crisis (Leither & Stehrer, 2013).

The decision to pull the United States out of negotiations for the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP), taken soon after Trump’s arrival in the White House, is another clear demonstration in this regard. It should be pointed out, however, that the United States has always been rather wary of multilateralism, for various reasons; above all, because of the difficulty in carrying out the necessary transfers of sovereignty, and the high negotiating power they have enjoyed for decades and, therefore, for the temptation to take advantage of bilateral negotiations in specific situations. However, despite the resistance in question, the development of multilateralism and international institutions in the last half century owes much to American support (Magri, 2017). And this, of course, is as true in Latin America as it is elsewhere. Hence the concern of many analysts regarding Trump’s decision to abandon the TPP negotiations, the common market project that would have included most of the Latin American countries facing the Pacific, plus Australia, Japan and Vietnam. It began during the presidency of George W. Bush and was carried out by the Obama administration with the purpose, among other things, of countering growing Chinese influence in the region. Trump’s decision could definitively challenge decades of US leadership within the liberal international order, as well as, of course, its own hegemonic position in the hemisphere. The

Most countries in Latin America have completed or are approaching the completion of the fertility transition. Yet, the pace of the fertility decline in the region is characterized by vast inequalities. There are considerable cross-country and within-country differences, and women in lower socioeconomic strata continue to be more at risk of high adolescent and total fertility. This dissertation investigates reproductive health disparities in four Central American countries, Paraguay, and Argentina. Using Demographic and Reproductive Health Surveys, as well as a unique longitudinal dataset from Northern Argentina, I employ logistic regression, event history analysis, and logistic random effects techniques to examine the factors related to disparities in out-of-union childbearing, sexual behaviors in the transition to adulthood, and contraceptive use among indigenous women. I find that young age, residence in the capital region, and higher levels of religiosity and wealth are significantly related to out-of-union fertility in Paraguay. In Central America, age distributions for important events during the transition to adulthood have undergone little to no change over the past two decades. School