The information technology industry is constructing a new research and development hub for software: Santiago, Chile. The Latin American capital has the attributes that have made emerging markets attractive to outsourcers, such as cheap wages; dependable, state-of-the-art infrastructure; and government incentives. While Chile’s small labor force will hinder its rise, the country also boasts an outsize pool of highly educated computer engineers and a time zone that’s synchronous with the U.S. East Coast.Tata Consultancy Services has increased its software application development in Chile by over 30% in the past three years. Another Indian company, Polaris Software Lab, which works with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Microsoft (MSFT), among others, just opened a credit-card software development center in Santiago and expects to be up to 100 employees by yearend.
“We think of Chile as the specialized neurosurgeon of IT outsourcing,” says Douglas Gattuso, a managing director at Miami-based IT consultant Neoris USA, which has a 125-person office in Santiago. “Mexico, Argentina—they’re the general practitioners.”
A survey by Brazil’s Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) business school and Germany’s Institute for Economic Research Institute (Ifo) shows that the economic outlook for Latin America in the coming six months is good.
The Economic Climate Index (ECI) for July 2009 shows that Latin America is entering the recovery phase of the business cycle, with Brazil recording the second highest economic climate index in the region. The ECI rose to 4.0 points in July from 3.6 points in April. A breakdown of the findings shows that while the Present Situation Index (PSI) is still low, the Expectations Index (EI) increased to 5.4 from 4.6 points between April and July.A special survey was conducted to evaluate how the experts perceived the legal and administrative restrictions on foreign firms in their respective countries. Peru, Uruguay and Chile have been classified as countries without restrictions. Low restrictions have been attributed to Colombia, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Mexico. High restrictions were associated with Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador.
Technorati Tags: latin america, trade, economic trends
Add this to the potential causes for water wars. More reasons to consider agriculture outsourcing in Latin America to hedge risk as crop areas in Punjab shrink as a result.
via Science Daily
Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade – and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame.More than 109 cubic kilometers (26 cubic miles) of groundwater disappeared from the region’s aquifers between 2002 and 2008 – double the capacity of India’s largest surface-water reservoir, the Upper Wainganga, and triple that of Lake Mead, the largest manmade reservoir in the U.S.
People are pumping northern India’s underground water, mostly to irrigate cropland, faster than natural processes can replenish it, said Jay Famiglietti and Isabella Velicogna, UCI Earth system scientists, and Matt Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.“If measures are not soon taken to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, consequences for the 114 million residents of the region may include a collapse of agricultural output, severe shortages of potable water, conflict and suffering,” said Rodell, lead author of the study and former doctoral student of Famiglietti’s at the University of Texas at Austin.
Study results will be published online Aug. 12 in the journal Nature.
Technorati Tags: agriculture, india, water wars
