scholarly journals Latin American countries and the establishment of the multilateral trading system: the Havana Conference (1947-1948)

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-329
Author(s):  
NORMA BREDA DOS SANTOS

ABSTRACT This article proposes to study the participation of Latin American delegations during the Havana Conference, which negotiated and approved the Charter of International Trade Organization (ITO), including the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), in 1947-1948. It shows that the prevalent understanding of Latin American countries was that the Havana negotiations would be the outcome of their existing political and material power asymmetries in relation to the industrialized countries. They believed that their fragile economies should face the strong economies of the industrialized countries by economic planning and import substitution, already in place in several Latin American countries since the 1930s and the 1940s. The article also shows that the construction of the post-World War II international trade regime was in fact characterized by strong material and political inequalities, which undermined Latin American countries abilities to negotiate.

Author(s):  
Rafail R. Mukhametzyanov ◽  
◽  
Ana Isabel Fedorchuk Mac-Eachen ◽  
Gulnara K. Dzhancharova ◽  
Nikolay G. Platonovskiy ◽  
...  

The orientation of a part of the population of economically developed countries to a healthy diet, the spread of ideas of vegetarianism, concern for the environment, and relatively higher incomes contributed to an increase in demand for fruits, berries and nuts of tropical and subtropical origin. Some of them, in particular bananas, oranges, tangerines, lemons, have become common food products and practically everyday consumption for the majority of the population of developed countries in the last quarter of the 20th century. In the future, some other types of fresh fruit and berry products from the tropics and subtropics (for example, pineapple, kiwi, avocado) gradually, due to increased production and international trade, also became more economically available to the ordinary consumer. Based on the analysis of statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for 1961-2019, the article shows a number of trends in international trade (for exports) of major tropical fruits are reflected, with a deeper look at the participation of Latin American countries in this process. It was revealed that some states of this region, such as Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Honduras, Peru, Brazil, Chile, occupy significant positions in the supply of bananas, pineapple, avocado, mango, papaya to the world market. Currently, Russia is one of the largest countries in the world in terms of imports of fruit and berry products, therefore, the issue of its participation as a subject of demand in the world tropical fruit market is raised.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-566
Author(s):  
Dario Gaggio

In the aftermath of World War II, Italy’s centrist leaders saw in the emerging US empire an opportunity to implement emigration schemes that had been in circulation for decades. Hundreds of thousands of Italian peasant farmers could perhaps be able to settle on Latin American and African land thanks to the contribution of US capital. This article examines the Italian elites’ obsession with rural colonization abroad as the product of their desire to valorize the legacy of Italy's settler colonialism in Libya and thereby reinvent Italy's place in the world in the aftermath of military defeat and decolonization. Despite the deep ambivalence of US officials, Italy received Marshall Plan funds to carry out experimental settlements in several Latin American countries. These visions of rural settlement also built on the nascent discourses about the ‘development’ of non-western areas. Despite the limited size and success of the Italian rural ‘colonies’ in Latin America, these projects afford a window into the politics of decolonization, the character of US hegemony at the height of the Cold War, and the evolving attitude of Latin American governments towards immigration and rural development. They also reveal the contradictory relationships between Italy's leaders and the country's rural masses, viewed as redundant and yet precious elements to be deployed in a global geopolitical game.


Author(s):  
Yue Teng

ABSTRACTThis paper examines educational inequality in nine Latin American countries at the sub-country level from the 1950s to the 1990s. Educational inequality is measured by the difference in schooling years between the taller and the shorter half of the female population. Schooling years significantly increased across birth cohorts, especially before the 1980s, regardless of socio-economic stratum, region or country. However, educational inequality persisted. This finding reflects the achievement of the import substitution industrialisation era in educational development and its failure in mitigating the unequal distribution of education rooted in Latin America's social structure. Trade liberalisation and educational expansion are found to reduce educational inequality in capital and urban regions, whereas democracy and tax reform increased it. By contrast, educational inequality in rural regions was hardly influenced by policy changes. This finding urges future explorations into whether the persistence of educational inequality in rural regions is due to endemic social structure.


Author(s):  
Zelideth María Rivas

Representations of Asians in Latin America and the Caribbean have been caught in the fissures of history, in part because their presence ambivalently affirms, depends upon, and simultaneously denies dominant narratives of race. While these populations are often stereotyped and mislabed as chino, Latin American countries have also made them into symbols of kinship and citizenship by providing a connection to Asia as a source of economic and political power. Yet, their presence highlights a rupture in nationalistic ideas of race that emphasize the European, African, and indigenous. Historically, Asian Latin American and Caribbean literary and cultural representations began during the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade (1565–1815) with depictions of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino slaves and galleon laborers. Soon after, Indian and Chinese laborers were in demand as coolie trafficking became prevalent throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Toward the end of the 19th century, Latin American and Caribbean countries began to establish political ties with Asia, ushering in Asian immigrants as a replacement labor force for African slaves. By the beginning of World War II, first- and second-generation immigrants recorded their experiences in poetry, short stories, and memoirs, often in their native languages. World War II disrupted Asian diplomacy with Latin America, and Caribbean and Latin American countries enacted laws that ostracized and deported Japanese immigrants. World War II also marked a change for Asian immigrants to Latin America and the Caribbean: they shifted from temporary to permanent immigrants. Here, authors depicted myriad aspects of their identities—language and citizenship, race, and sexuality—in their birth languages. In other words, late 20th century and early 21st century literature highlights the communities as Latin American and Caribbean. Finally, the presence of Asians in Latin America and the Caribbean has influenced Latin American and Caribbean literature and cultural production, highlighting them as characters and their cultures as themes. Most importantly, however, Latin American modernism emerged from a Latin American orientalism that differs from a European orientalism.


2015 ◽  
pp. 17-18
Author(s):  
Iván F. Pacheco

While some industrialized countries face a surplus of PhDs in many fields of knowledge, developing countries face the opposite problem.  This might be a great opportunity for Latin American countries to attract talent.  However, most countries do not have a clear policy for the recruitment of faculty abroad and, when they do, it is mostly focused on recovering their own expatriates from their work abroad.


1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip L. Kelly

Interest in geopolitics in England, the United States, and many other countries became dormant following World War II in reaction to the expansionisticgeopolitikof Hitlerian strategists. Its re-awakening is only recently apparent. However, this approach has maintained its influence and vitality in South America's Southern Cone, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil, where military governments predominate, the United States is more distant, and particular national problems encourage traditional geopolitical solutions. Among these Latin American countries, Brazil's geopolitics is the most developed and extensive.


1968 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang König

The persistence of trade and exchange controls in developing countries is of growing concern among economic circles and has been dealt with in recent discussions and papers, both published and unpublished. In Latin America exchange practices have severely tested the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which represents the prevailing ideology of a liberal international monetary policy. The principles and activities of this institution have tended to conflict in many ways with the development efforts of Latin American countries—a fact that has not always been fully recognized due to the confidential nature of many of the Fund's actions. One important issue has been the problem of multiple exchange rates, which, in many Latin American countries, came to constitute an important instrument of the policy of industrialization through import substitution.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Oleg N. Zhilkin ◽  
Wilmer Paul Chavarry Galvez

The article discusses issues of international trade theory and current global economic trends to assess the possibility of developing the foreign economic sector in Latin America as a whole, and in particular, Peru. Using development statistics from the foreign trade sector, and considering global trends in international trade over the past decade, an attempt is made to assess the ability of Latin American countries to meet growing differentiated demand and thus specialize in advantageous sectors, allowing them to integrate into global supply chains by providing resources, goods, and services at primary, secondary, and tertiary market levels. By examining the potential of Latin American countries, there is a real possibility of creating value chains around market niches that exist in global trade and applying them to ensure that Latin American products receive international recognition. In this context, the analysis of the dynamics of trade exchange is taken as a basis for comparing Peru with other countries, since according to the IMF, in recent years, Peru is one of the countries with the highest economic growth forecast in Latin America. Peru has great potential in mining (in Ankash, Arequipa and Junin, among other places), commercial fishing (Ankash, Liberty, Piura and others), agriculture (Piura, Liberty, Ica and others), camelid breeding (vicuña, alpaca, etc., in Puno, Junin, Cuzco) and other activities. In 2018, Peru managed to raise total exports up to $47.7 billion USD (+7.5% from 2017), thus achieving a historic record for Peruvian exports. This growth is explained by noticeable growth in the non-traditional sector, which reached $13.2 billion (+12.6% from 2017). The present study uses the theory of comparative advantage to quantify product competitiveness based on global comparison, which helps indicate how to move towards higher levels of specialization in the production and export structure. To analyze international trade data, we used indicators such as the Balance of Trade and the Balassa Index, which allowed us to determine a list of thirty products, of which twenty (traditional and non-traditional) showed a steady increase in exports, and the other ten, mainly non-traditional, despite being lower in ranking, have greater potential for further growth.


2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-389
Author(s):  
RICHARD BLACKHURST

Three times since its founding in 1948, the GATT/WTO has turned to outside experts for help in finding solutions to pressing issues confronting the multilateral trading system. In 1957 the Contracting Parties decided to create a panel of three (later four) internationally recognized experts in international trade and finance to consider trends in world trade, andin particular the failure of the trade of the less developed countries to develop as rapidly as that of industrialized countries, excessive short-term fluctuations in prices of primary products, and widespread resort to agricultural protection.


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