A broad ranging discussion I had with the Ambassador at his office in Buenos Aires last week.
Popularity: 2% [?]
The Latin America Interview with Indian Ambassador R. Viswanathan
December 23rd, 2011 Posted in Brazil, Commodities, India, Infrastructure, Investing, Latin America, Mexico, Uruguay, colombia
Latin America, especially Mercosur, is leading the global economic recovery. The forecasted growth in GDP for Mercosur countries in 2011 is 7.5%, and for Latin America in general it’s 5.8%. From MercoPress:
“Things in Latinamerica have rolled much better than expected” in an international context which still faces some turbulences resulting from the prolonged slowdown which begun in late 2008, according to Joaquin Vial, BBVA chief economist for South America
Vial said that besides domestic demand, the booming international prices of commodities have attracted a massive inflow of capital and an overall appreciation of the region’s currencies.
Domestic demand stimuli was followed by a strong consumers and investors confidence reaction, together with a favourable evolution of employment, which helped to begin a gradual withdrawal of fiscal and credit incentives.
In this scenario the countries which currently have the best growth prospects are Paraguay, 10.1%; Uruguay, 8.8% and Peru, 8.5%. Argentina is poised to expand 8%; Brazil 7.5%; Panama, 6% while the only country that could end the twelve months with an economic contraction is Venezuela, probably 2.3%.
Also, see this praise of Latin America from the IMF.
Popularity: 4% [?]
China, Brazil to fuel global economic growth – International Business – MiamiHerald.com
Latin America and the East Asian Tigers are lifting the world economic tide, showing more resilience to the global economic crisis than the United States and many European nations.Such a growth path is a break from the past for Latin American and Caribbean countries, which have had a “history of frequent and devastating financial crises,” the World Bank said in a report called The New Face of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The keys to the newfound resiliency of the Latin American and Caribbean region were more sound monetary policies and better debt and fiscal management, the World Bank said. But a growing connection to emerging Asian economies — especially for South American countries, Costa Rica and Panama — and the region’s evolution from a net debtor to a net creditor to the rest of the world were also big factors.
In addition to Brazil — Florida’s top trading partner — the best performers this year are expected to be Argentina, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay.
Technorati Tags: latin america, economic growth
Popularity: 3% [?]
According to the commerce ministry officials, India is looking forward to sign an FTA with Peru as the first step of engagement. It is also eyeing similar trade agreements with some other Latin American countries. “Latin America is a key bloc for us. So far our trade has been restricted to Brazil and Argentina but there are other key markets which we are exploring,” an official said.The government is looking forward to include newer Latin American countries in the focus market scheme (FMS) and announce tax breaks for Indian exporters. India is also expected to reduce import duties on a set of imports from Latin America. According to a report published by Inter-American Development Bank, agricultural exports from Latin America attract an import duty of 65% in India.
The initiative has been taken up by Jyotiraditya Scindia, minister of state for commerce. In an earlier interview with FE, Scindia had said that Latin America housed a set of developing economies which held a lot of potential of trade with India. “In our foreign trade policy (FTP) announcement, we have steadily shifted the focus to developing countries because it is from these areas that the growth will come,” Scindia said. Earlier this month Scindia led a delegation to Peru scouting opportunities for enhanced trade between the two countries.
Technorati Tags: trade, FTA, Peru
Popularity: 3% [?]
Michael Burry, one of the stars of Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, labeled agriculture as one of his top trades. Burry is a noted value investor who earned strong returns as the Tech Bubble collapsed, and even more out-sized returns on his short bet against the housing market in the time preceding the subprime collapse. Burry provided this insight into his latest trade:
“I believe that agriculture land — productive agricultural land with water on site — will be very valuable in the future….I’ve put a good amount of money into that.”
This weekend on his personal blog, Jim Rogers wrote a quick little note about how “Asia will drive agriculture commodities higher“:
There`s 3 billion people in Asia and most of them have not had a very good standard of living in the past 200 years. That is changing and changing very rapidly. They are going to eat more, they are going to wear more clothes.
Popularity: 4% [?]
In an effort to further increase trade between Mercosur and India, representatives from both sides will soon meet to expand the number of products covered by the Agreement on Fixed Tariff Preferences (AFTP).
From MercoPress:
“Teams from both sides have been meeting and we pledged to develop a list of new products to be included in the agreement in November this year,” Scindia told a press conference after the India-Brazil Business Meeting in Sao Paulo.
The Agreement on Fixed Tariff Preferences (APTF) between India and Mercosur comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay entered into force in 2009, aiming at creating a free trade area.
The APTF agreement, which currently covers import and export of 452 products, is to gradually increase the categories of products with special taxation.
The extension of the agreement will be of strategic importance to boost trade relations between the countries involved, Scindia said.
Trade volume between Mercosur and India should reach 17 billion US dollars in 2012 and 30 billion dollars in 2030, according to estimates of the Indian minister.
Roberto Giannetti, director of the Department of International Relations of the Federation of Industries of Sao Paulo, said free trade between Mercosur and India would also be beneficial to Brazil.
“We’re very interested in a Mercosur-India free trade agreement. Brazil needs investments to be made in several areas and may also collaborate with India, especially in the supply of food and energy,” he said.
Brazil-India trade increased from 1 billion dollars in 2003 to 4.7 billion dollars in 2008, according to the Brazilian government.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Latin America’s impressive little guys: Uruguay and Paraguay
September 17th, 2010 Posted in Economics - Indicators, Policy and Trends, Latin America, Paraguay, Uruguay, Videos
Talk about Latin America’s rising stars and the focus is often on Peru or Colombia. But don’t overlook the little countries: Paraguay and Uruguay are punching above their weight – and both have just been upgraded by rating agency Standard’s & Poor’s.
That’s a tribute to their economic performance: Uruguay rode out the global crisis without recession, while Paraguay is growing at its fastest rate in 30 years. Both are also catching the attention of some foreign corporate investors.
After 2.9 per cent growth in 2009, Uruguay is now on course for 6.5 per cent this year. S&P has moved its sovereign debt rating to double B minus. That’s within two notches of investment grade, which is what Uruguay lost in 2002 during an economic crisis that spilled over from neighbouring Argentina. Its president, José Mujica, wants to regain [investment grade] status before his term ends in 2014.
Uruguay last month hosted a business promotion seminar organised by the Council of the Americas, whose president, Susan Segal, said US investors were looking with interest at agriculture, biotechnology and technology exchange opportunities in the Atlantic-coast country. Uruguay sees natural resources as key to future growth: it is already exploiting a gap in the market left by declining Argentine beef production, and is seeking to develop what it believes are large offshore hydrocarbons resources. But Mujica has also appealed for young people to “fall in love with maths and scientific analysis” to lay the foundations for a tech-savvy future.
Paraguay, a landlocked country whose population is unique in Latin America by still speaking the language of its Indian ancestors, Guaraní, is also emerging as a promising investment destination. Rio Tinto Alcan is planning to invest $2.5bn in an aluminium smelter. To give a sense of the project’s scale, the investment is equal to virtually half the reserves of the central bank. What’s more, Paraguay’s economy is on fire – set to grow at around 9 per cent this year, a 30-year-high according to Gabriel Torres, analyst at Moody’s Investor Service.
Central bank reserves have doubled in the last three years and political stability has increased under the presidency of Fernando Lugo, who took office in 2008 after 61 years of one-party rule.
Technorati Tags: uruguay, paraguay, economic growth, S&P rating upgrade
Popularity: 4% [?]
Latin America’s new promise…and why India should pay attention
September 15th, 2010 Posted in Economics - Indicators, Policy and Trends, Latin America, Politics, Public Policy
Nobody’s backyard | The Economist
look beyond the headlines, and, as our special report shows, something remarkable is happening in Latin America. In the five years to 2008 the region’s economies grew at an annual average rate of 5.5%, while inflation was in single digits. The financial crisis briefly interrupted this growth, but it was the first in living memory in which Latin America was an innocent bystander, not a protagonist. This year the region’s economy will again expand by more than 5%. Economic growth is going hand in hand with social progress. Tens of millions of Latin Americans have climbed out of poverty and joined a swelling lower-middle class. Although income distribution remains more unequal than anywhere else in the world, it is at least getting less so in most countries. While Latin American squabbling politicians blather on about integration, the region’s businesses are quietly getting on with the job—witness the emerging cohort of multilatinas.
Brazil, the region’s powerhouse, is the cause of much of the excitement. But Chile, Colombia and Peru are growing as handsomely and even Mexican society is forging ahead, despite the drug violence and the deeper recession visited on it by its ties to the more sickly economy in the United States.
Two things lie behind Latin America’s renaissance. The first is the appetite of China and India for the raw materials with which the continent is richly endowed. But the second is the improvement in economic management that has brought stability to a region long hobbled by inflation and has fostered a rapid, and so far sustainable, expansion of credit from well-regulated banking systems. Between them, these two things have created a virtuous circle in which rising exports are balanced by a growing domestic market.
Latin America Tourism
Popularity: 2% [?]
Global Warming and Agriculture (www.cgdev.org)
UPI.com
Welcome to the future. The combination of population growth, richer diets and the erosion of arable land means that there will be pressure on food supplies for decades to come.
Wheat prices touched $300 a ton last month, almost double their price in April. Beef prices in the United States are back to their 2008 peak of 90 cents a pound, after a bumpy but steady rise from 60 cents a decade ago. Prices for lamb have tripled in the course of this decade.But there are two wild cards lurking in the future that could turn crisis into catastrophe. The first is climate change. It matters not whether one assumes this is caused by human action or is simply one of those centuries-long trends of warming and cooling that has marked the Earth’s history. Temperatures are rising, weather and rainfall patterns are shifting and these changes will have major impact on crops and yields.
The most serious study yet produced on the likely impact of climate change on food, by William Cline of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, claims that the most serious change could come in India.
His model suggests that the overall food crop in India could fall by as much as 30 percent over the next 25 years. Since India’s population is expected to grow from 1.1 billion to 1.5 billion over the same period, this spells disaster.
The second wild card is a form of wheat rust called Ug99, so named because it first emerged in Uganda in 1999. At first it was thought to have been controlled within a limited area but it seems to be spreading inexorably. First it hit crops in Kenya, then Ethiopia. Then it jumped across the Red Sea to Yemen and has now been found in Iran. This year it was found in South Africa.
Worse still, it isn’t a single fungus. It has developed four variants so far, which means it can overcome most of the cocktails of wheat breeds that scientists have developed over recent decades.
The fear is that the virus spreads from Iran eastward into the Punjab, the breadbasket of the Indian subcontinent, with dire implications for India and Pakistan. Or it could move north into the Caucasus and central Asia and then attack Russia and the Ukraine and Europe.
Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 4% [?]
TWO OF AMIT WADHWANEY’S passions are international stocks and ethnic restaurants. That he is an avowed value investor is no surprise, given that Third Avenue Management, his employer, was founded in the mid-1980s by famed bargain-hunter Marty Whitman. Wadhwaney’s duties include running the Third Avenue International Fund (TAVIX). Barron’s recently caught up by Wadhwaney by phone.
Although investors in other parts in Latin America have started investing in Colombia, there is very a long way to go. On the plus side, there is a lot more de-risking that is taking place in Colombia on the ground level in terms of security, which is resulting in the opening up and starting up of new businesses. Consider, for example, the world of resources. Exploration in Colombia over the years for things like hydrocarbons, base metals, precious metals and coal was nonexistent. You didn’t dare do it because you wouldn’t come out of the bush alive. Now, on the other hand, there is a whole industry building—and not just because of the better security. It’s also because of the tremendous legal infrastructure that is in place to protect foreign investors—something lacking in many other countries in the region.
Popularity: 3% [?]
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the Latin America category.
- The Latin America Interview with Indian Ambassador R. Viswanathan http://t.co/L27lgZyt
- India, Uruguay sign double tax avoidance treaty http://t.co/F1uHSlU
- World Economic Report A Mixed Bag For CIVETS Countries, including Colombia http://t.co/GeRbskZ
- How Women Can Win the Talent Wars in Emerging Markets http://t.co/SJC4v2n
- Miners should look at protection measures as the resource nationalism tide http://t.co/MGBcGyz
- Europeans Face LatAm Asset Choice | LatinFinance | Wednesday, September 7, 2011 http://t.co/7o4Qeen
- Birlas eye Latam assets of Cemex, Votorantim Cimentos http://t.co/xQP1M09
- Shree Renuka Sugars to sell 25% in Renuka Brasil Holdings - The Economic Times http://t.co/WA0RHzz
Twitter: induslatin
Translator
 |  |  |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||