The effects of corruption on growth, human development and natural resources sector: empirical evidence from a Bayesian panel VAR for Latin American and Nordic countries

Chapter Seven - The relationship between financial openness, renewable and nonrenewable energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and economic growth in the Latin American countries: an approach with a panel vector auto regression model

3 - Interactions between obesity, economic growth, globalisation, urbanisation and poverty in Latin American and Caribbean countries

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the performance and the relationship between competitiveness, real gross domestic product (GDP) growth and human development in 20 countries of the Latin America and Caribbean region during the 2006-2015 period. The main argument to uphold here is that – from the perspective of virtuous circle – countries with better conditions of competitiveness are those with better economic performance and with better conditions for human development.Design/methodology/approachTime series data were organized at three levels: individual countries, groups of nations and Latin America and Caribbean as a whole. Indicators used were: index of competitiveness, rates of change in real GDP and Human Development Index. Cluster analysis tests were performed: data ranges were determined and quintiles were established. Countries were ranked in five categories and comparative position matrices were determined for each variable. Linear correlations between indexes were calculated. Linear correlation coefficients were determined in terms of groups of countries and considering Latin America and Caribbean as a whole.FindingsFindings revealed that decreasing conditions in competitiveness and economic growth indicators are the representative situation since 2009. The most competitive country in the region is Chile, and the weakest is Venezuela. Nevertheless, all Latin American and Caribbean countries analyzed seem to have made progress in terms of human, economic and social development. Regarding correlations, Dominican Republic showed an inverse relationship between competitiveness and economic growth, while Jamaica and Venezuela showed inverse relationships between competitiveness and human development. At the individual country level, no statistically significant relationship between economic growth and human development was detected.Research limitations/implicationsFindings highlight the necessity of future research that result in a deeper understanding of the transmission mechanisms between economic and social performance in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Particular reasons at the micro level that explain improvements or deteriorations in competitiveness and human development must also be analyzed. Based on the degrees of freedom, time series could have included more years, but a lack of information was found for some countries. It would also be necessary to observe each particular case considering the type of economy, production characteristics and export/import composition.Practical implicationsResults complement the existing literature by exploring competitiveness and its relationship with economic and social variables in developing countries. The authors also believe that this paper is relevant for macroeconomic and social policy debates involving competitiveness and human well-being in this region of the world.Originality/valueThis paper supports an important argument: human well-being and national development must be the ultimate goal of competitiveness. Traditional literature focuses on levels and determinants of competitiveness in developed countries, but it usually does not take into account social and human aspects of the process in developing countries. Little attention has been paid to analyze the relationship between competitiveness and socioeconomic variables in developing countries. Methods and findings of this paper complement the existing literature by studying the relationships among competitiveness, real GDP growth and human development in Latin American and Caribbean countries, using correlation analysis.

A promising potential partner for the Latin American region is Canada, which is also interested in diversifying its economy and strengthening investment and trade ties. But the closest economic ties have developed between Canada, the United States and Mexico, which is due not only to geographical proximity, but also to participation in the North American Free Trade Agreement - NAFTA, and later USMCA. The subject of the study in the article is Canada's trade cooperation with Latin and North American countries. The aim is to study the economic and trade relations of Canada and Latin American countries in the context of North American integration from the point of view of a holistic view of their evolution. Methods: in studying the model of economic integration, the historical method and comparative analysis were used; statistical analysis was used to analyze the trends in the development of trade cooperation between Canada and Latin American countries. The following results were obtained: based on the analysis, it is noted that the development of economic and trade relations between Canada and Latin American countries almost completely corresponds to the interests of Canada, which wants to get a quick return on its investments in the region. Latin America appreciates working with Ottawa in key areas, actively using Canadian investments in the industrial and social spheres. But the closest economic ties have developed between Canada, the USA and Mexico, which is due not only to geographical proximity, but also to their economic integration, which was regulated by various documents - NAFTA and USMCA. Conclusions: Canada considers the Latin American region as a rather promising direction of development due to the richness of economic relations, the volume of trade turnover is quite stable, and today there are hardly any factors that can influence this trend. At the same time, the closest economic ties are developing between Canada, the USA and Mexico within the framework of the USMCA integration agreement and their intensification is given special attention, taking into account new requirements.

The linkages between natural resources, human capital, globalization, economic growth, financial development, and ecological footprint: The moderating role of technological innovations

PART OF LATIN AMERICAN TRADE with countries of the European Payments Union is conducted on a dollar basis, part on a sterling basis, and the remainder on the basis of other currencies. The payments, clearing, and compensation arrangements of Latin American countries with Europe differ widely from country to country and are subject to frequent change, making difficult a precise division of Latin America into "dollar area" and "nondollar area" countries. Some Latin American countries which have "Bilateral Accounts" with the sterling area are "dollar countries" insofar as continental European countries are concerned. Other Latin American countries, however, which are classified in the "American Account" group of the sterling area, have bilateral arrangements with some continental countries. Certain bilateral payments agreements between Latin American and European countries provide that freely disposable U.S. dollars shall be used as the means of effecting commercial payments (e.g., the agreement between Uruguay and Italy and that between Peru and Western Germany). Other agreements, in contrast, employ the U.S. dollar as a unit of account ("restricted" dollars); the mechanism of current settlements, however, is designed to avoid payment in freely disposable U.S. dollars, and only final settlement at the termination of the agreement is to be effected in freely disposable U.S. dollars, other agreed currencies, or gold. (See Table 1.) With countries that are classified in the American account group by the U.K. Exchange Control, U.K. trade is in effect conducted on a dollar basis, under a mechanism whereby the United Kingdom makes payments in sterling which is convertible into dollars whenever the recipient country so requests. In this group are the Central American countries, the Caribbean countries, and Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The Latin American countries included in the American account group of the sterling area do not coincide exactly with the countries

Intragenerational Income Mobility in Latin America Gary S. Fields (bio), Robert Duval Hernández (bio), Samuel Freije (bio), and María Laura Sánchez Puerta (bio) Latin American countries have experienced substantial macroeconomic instability over the last few decades. While the region as a whole experienced economic growth during most of the 1990s and 2000s, there were also years of stagnation and economic decline. Furthermore, most of the countries in the region experienced quite varied episodes of growth, crisis, and recession. Economists have traditionally assessed the welfare impact of these fluctuations on the population by studying the evolution of economic inequality and poverty. Questions regarding who benefits from economic growth and who is hurt by economic decline have been answered by examining the changes in cross-sectional inequality or poverty associated with these episodes. While it is important to know the evolution of inequality or poverty per se, this type of analysis fails to measure one important aspect of welfare, namely, the evolution of the well-being of given economic units through time. The goal of mobility analysis is precisely to study this dynamic evolution of well-being for units identified through time. The following example demonstrates the difference between cross-sectional analyses of inequality (or poverty) and mobility analysis. Take an imaginary economy with two individuals whose initial incomes are $1 and $3. Suppose the economy grows and the new incomes are $1 and $5. Inequality has clearly increased in the course of economic growth, but what has happened to the destinies of specific individuals? Anonymous data provide no indication. Panel data, however, reveal two underlying possibilities. The result of adopting the notational convention that individuals (denoted by Greek letters) are ordered [End Page 101] from lowest initial income to highest initial income in the initial income vector was either Case I: or Case II: In the first case, the income of the poorest individual remained unchanged, while the income of the initially richer individual grew. In the second case, the initially poor individual experienced a substantial income gain, while the other individual recorded an income loss. As this brief example illustrates, simply comparing anonymous distributions of income across time cannot answer questions like whether the (initially) poor are getting poorer and the (initially) rich richer or whether economic growth is benefiting individuals who were initially poor. Mobility analysis addresses such issues by tracking the evolution of individual incomes over time and identifying the winners and losers of the growth process. In other words, the crucial difference between mobility studies and dynamic comparisons of cross-sectional measures of inequality and poverty is that mobility studies can unveil the intertemporal anonymity that accompanies cross-sectional studies. Economic mobility has not been widely studied in developing countries until very recently owing to the lack of suitable data. Studying mobility requires longitudinal data tracking economic units (that is, individuals, households, or firms) over time. Collecting this type of data is expensive, and historically few Latin American countries carried it out. Now, however, such data sets are available for a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries; table A-1 in the appendix provides a list of available panel data sets that can be used for income mobility studies for these countries. In this paper, we discuss how the knowledge gleaned from mobility studies differs from comparable cross-sectional analysis. The structure of the paper is as follows. The next section discusses what mobility is, how it can be measured, and how it differs from inequality. The subsequent section reviews previous mobility studies in Latin American countries. The paper then summarizes the contribution of our own recent work, and [End Page 102] the final section discusses what lies ahead in mobility research for Latin American economies. As indicated by the title, this paper deals only with the study of intragenerational mobility. Intergenerational mobility is an important area of research, but we do not address it for the sake of brevity. Readers interested in this literature applied to Latin America should refer to the authoritative paper by Behrman, Gaviria, and Székely.1 Defining Mobility and How It Differs from Inequality As used in this paper, an income distribution is the entire vector of...

This chapter investigates the impact of financial openness on renewable energy investment in Latin American countries from 1980 to 2014. A panel autoregressive distributed lags (PARDL) model in the form of an unrestricted error correction model (UECM) is estimated, and robustness checks and causality analysis are performed with a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model and a panel Granger causality Wald test. The PARDL estimates indicate that financial openness has a positive long-run impact on renewable energy investment, proxied by the installed capacity of renewable energy. Such investment is also positively affected by per capita economic growth (in the short run) and per capita general government’s capital stock (in the long run). The robustness assessment confirms positive causalities between per capita economic growth, financial openness, and per capita general government capital stock. Furthermore, the results of the Granger causality analysis indicate that bidirectional Granger causal links exist between all the variables in the model.KeywordsEnergy economicsEconometricsFinancial opennessInvestmentRenewable energyLatin AmericaJEL CodesF40F62Q43

Five-year trend of antimicrobial susceptibility rates and daptomycin activity among Staphylococcus aureus isolates collected in Latin American medical eenters (2005-2009)

I compare the primatological literature in 4 Latin American (Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Argentina) 2 European (Great Britain and France) and one African (Kenya) countries with regard to: (1) total number of publications; (2) productivity of scientists; (3) quality of the publications; and (4) the range of subjects studied. Data are from Current Primate References (CPR; 1985–1994). Publications included in the sample show an address from the countries considered. The results showed that GB and France had a far larger number of publications than the other countries. They have respectively >7 and 4 times more authors than Brazil, the country with the highest number of authors among Latin American and African countries. But the mean number of publications per author shows little difference among the 7 countries. The quality of publications as measured by the percentage indexed by ISI shows that, GB and France fare much better than the Latin American countries. Kenya did not follow the pattern of the other underdeveloped countries and showed a high percentage of indexed publications. Not all subjects reviewed in CPR were studied by scientists from the 7 countries. GB and France presented the widest range of subjects. Scientists in countries with greater primate diversity concentrated their publications in behavior, ecology and conservation, colony management and general primatology with the exception of Kenya. These results suggest that scientific production in Latin American countries can be increased by increasing the number of scientists, either through educational programs or via incentives for the career. However, more specific action is needed to improve the quality of publications and the range of subjects studied.

Growth Challenges in Latin America: What is Unique About the Region?

The article is dedicated to diplomatic and trade-economic relations between Russia and Latin American countries as one of bases of multipolar world’s formation. Clearly, the emergence of the multipolar world is a difficult and long-term process. Yet, this world is now being created by states, political and economic associations, regions and whole continents. Latin American and Caribbean countries are actively participating in the formation of this new world order. The countries of the region hold quite independent views on many international problems including the formation of new world order, and these views share much similarity with Russian opinion on the matter. These states support the leading role of the UN and its Security Council; they did not join the western sanctions against Russia and practically stopped being the USA’s “backyard”. Moreover, the majority of Latin American countries have introduced the visa-free regime for Russian citizens. This lets us consider the Latin America to be the element in the building of the new world order. Many states seek to develop and support the stable diplomatic and trade-economic relations with Latin American countries, especially China, the USA and the European Union. Russia has a long history of international relations with Latin American countries. In the XIX century the Russian Empire established the diplomatic relations with Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. Later, the USSR supported close diplomatic and trade-economic relations with a number of Latin American states. After the dissolution of the USSR the Russian relations with these countries were recreated, developed and strengthened. Our cooperation is growing in all areas: diplomacy, trade, science, education, medicine, energy etc. Now the questions of creating the common bank and trading in national currencies are being discussed. Russia enjoys the diplomatic relations with all Latin American countries; these relations are evolving, and there are perspectives of their future enhancement.

Economics literature has paid relatively little attention to the study of underemployment, which is defined as the situation of an individual who works less than 35 hours a week, but wants to work more hours. This can be explained by the scarcity of data on underemployment, and by the fact that labor statistics treat it as employment, and thus its numbers may not create so much expectation as those of unemployment. The study of underemployment is important in view of its relation to poverty, especially as it affects women, and because of the psychological damages that result to underemployed individuals, particularly young people. This paper analyzes the behavior of underemployment in a sample of five Latin American countries by means of the estimation of an unrestricted vector auto-regressive (VAR) model using 2000-2008 panel data from five Latin American countries. The variables included in the VAR are: the unemployment and underemployment rates, female and male participation rates, and the indexes of formal employment and the real wage. Impulse response functions are analyzed to make inferences about the behavior of the variables in response to shocks to one of them. In addition, the paper develops models to represent the existence of participation and poverty traps, which, respectively, result from the interaction between unemployment, economic growth, inequality and participation and from the interplay between underemployment, poverty and children’s school desertion. The main results show that there exists an inverse relationship between formal employment and underemployment; that underemployment and female participation have persistent responses to shocks to unemployment; female and male participation decrease in response to a shock to the real wage; and underemployment and unemployment have persistent response to shocks to female participation. In general terms, the results show different responses along gender lines. Another result was that underemployment is the initial means of adjustment to recessionary periods and as such it is an early warning indicator of rising unemployment. The results show the prevalence of the discouraged and additional worker phenomena in the sample countries. The results have shown that underemployment can lead to persistent poverty and that it acts as a break on economic growth, which indicate the necessity of eliminating labor market segmentation by gender and directing attention to the particular needs of women (as well as those of young people, the elderly, the disabled, and ethnic minorities) with respect to their labor market participation.

WE-AB-213-02: Status of Medical Physics Collaborations, and Projects in Latin America

WE-AB-213-04: IAEA Support to Medical Physics in Africa and Latin America: Achievements and Challenges