A América do Sul em movimento

South America in movement. This paper discusses the prospects for the integration of South America, stressing that there are two competing projects. One the one hand, we have the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), as proposed by Washington, or bilateral free trade agreements with the United States in the FTAA format. On the other hand, we have Mercosur, recently expanded by the accession of Venezuela. Washington's still very significant but declining influence in South America, relations between Argentina and Brazil, Venezuela's entry into Mercosur, and the role of smaller countries are successively examined.

Novos modelos previdenciários na América Latina: lições da experiência Argentina

New pension programs in Latin America: lessons from the Argentinean experience. This work analyzes the political constraints of pension reform in Argentina. The first part presents a brief description of the development of pension programs in Latin America. Additionally, it also discusses the pension system crisis and the main proposals in order to overcome this crisis. The second part examines the peculiarities of the Argentine pension reform, with specific attention on economic imperatives and political constraints which have shaped the pension reform project of Menem´s Government (1989-1999). The article demonstrates that there are a large gap between the new system promises and its outcomes.

Liberalização da conta de capitais e crescimento econômico: evidências de dados em painel para a América Latina

The aim of this paper is to carry out an empirical analysis about the relation between Capital Account Liberalization and Economic Growth having as object of study the experience of 16 countries of Latin America with annual data for the period 1986-2000. The econometrical calculations do not corroborate the hypothesis that the liberalization of Capital Account would stimulate the economic growth. The results suggest an adverse effect of the liberalization of the Capital Account on the real growth gross domestic product per capita of the countries.

Cooperação monetária e financeira: o que é bom para a Ásia também é para a América Latina?

Monetary and financial cooperation: what is good to Asian is also good to Latin America?. This article compares the Asian and Latin American experiences with monetary cooperation. It is argued that in the latter such cooperation has hardly progressed, due to low degree of regional integration, the recurrent use of multilateral institutional resources to deal with external shocks and the lack of clear objectives: monetary cooperation is some times seen as a means to foster integration, but also as a means to provide long term funds and as a source of liquidity in foreign currencies. In Asia, differently, cooperation has apparently not been so instrumental to regional integration, but has proven to be quite important as a means to build a regional capital market as well as a mechanism to deal with external shocks.

Exportações e inovação: uma análise para América Latina e Sul-Sudeste da Ásia

The purpose of this study is to compare the performance of Latin America and South-Southeast Asia countries over the past three decades with respect to technological intensity of their exports. The main contribution of this paper is to construct an indicator of technological intensity to allow adequate measurement of the degree of knowledge content of exports from both regions. This indicator was calculated for all sample countries for the period 1983-2008, based on data from Comtrade/WITS and clearly show how Asian countries have a technological intensity of their exports much higher than the Latin American countries.