ON MAY 23rd in the Colombian city of Cali the presidents of four Latin American countries—Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru—will sign an agreement removing tariffs on 90% of their merchandise trade. They will also agree on a timetable of no more than seven years for eliminating tariffs on the remaining 10%. They have already removed [...]
Why eating more insects might be good for the planet and good for you WHAT we eat is dictated as much by culture as by choice or necessity. If you ask a Westerner to name the most disgusting thing they have eaten, there is a good chance that a crunchy cricket or a chewy grub could [...]
LATIN AMERICA, once as riddled with tariff barriers as it is with rivers, mountains and jungles, is about to claim global trade’s starring role. The race to head the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is now down to a Mexican and a Brazilian. Their candidacies highlight a schism that splits the region down the middle. In [...]
WITHIN a week, the decision on who should have hardest job in global trade—heading the World Trade Organisation (WTO)—will be made. The race has narrowed down to two Latin Americans, Herminio Blanco, a Mexican who negotiated the country’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and Roberto Azevêdo, Brazil’s ambassador to [...]
TO SUM up recent research predicting a mixed-race future for humanity, biologist Stephen Stearns of Yale University turns to an already intermingled nation. In a few centuries, he says, we will all “look like Brazilians”. Brazil shares with the United States a population built from European immigrants, their African slaves and the remnants of the [...]
ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO has made a promising start as Mexico’s president, according to this week’s print edition of The Economist. But he still has a lot to do: the trickiest parts of his ambitious reform agenda are yet to come. Other stories look mexican pharmacy at what Brazil is doing to tame the world’s biggest [...]
SOME inventions are so simple, you have to wonder why no one has come up with them before. One such is the electronic cigarette. Smoking tobacco is the most dangerous voluntary activity in the world. More than 5m people die every year of the consequences. That is one death in ten. People smoke because they [...]
Caffeine-powered Neves (right) IN 2002, when Aécio Neves was elected governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s second-most-populous state was close to bankruptcy. It had an annual deficit of 940m reais ($270m at the time); three years earlier it had briefly defaulted on its debt, a move which inadvertently triggered a devaluation of Brazil’s currency. Mr Neves [...]
AT THE end of the last year Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, thought she had brokered a compromise between local governments in the three Brazilian states with significant oil deposits (Rio de Janeiro, with Espírito Santo and São Paulo a long way behind) and those elsewhere in the country, which currently get little oil wealth. Her [...]
LAST week Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, made an audacious claim: extreme poverty in Brazil will soon become extinct. Brasil Sem Miséria (Brazil without destitution), a federal programme, has already added 2.8m extremely poor people to a new, single list of potential welfare recipients since its launch in June 2011. A total of 22m people have been [...]