Latin American Insiders Forecast Economic Outlook for 2010

by McDermott Will & Emery, for The Earth Times, December 17, 2009.

HOUSTON – (Business Wire) 2010 promises to be a year of economic progress and new business opportunities in Latin America. That’s the latest forecast from some of the leading law firms in Central America, the Caribbean and South America.

U.S. trade with Latin American countries totals some $600 billion a year, and the region’s role in the overall global economy is gaining ground. China now does more than $100 billion in trade with Central and South American countries — up 20 times from just a decade ago. At the same time, China is also making substantial sovereign wealth investments in the region’s energy resources, as well as other infrastructure.

Regional Opportunity

“Latin America has successfully weathered the economic storms of the past year,” said José Luis Vittor, partner in the global law firm McDermott Will & Emery, which sponsored a recent two-day Latin America Forum, bringing together some of the top players in the legal and business community to focus on outlook, policy, and opportunities in Latin American markets today.

“Because Latin America has been largely insulated from the impact of the global recession in the past two years, there should be even more opportunities for such economic development in the coming year,” said Vittor, who coordinated the Forum program…(continue reading)

Small earthquake hurts centre-left

by The Economist, December 17, 2009.

For the past two decades Chile has been rather well-governed by the Concertación, a centre-left coalition. For much of that time it was the one Latin country that recorded an Asian rate of economic growth. The share of Chileans living in poverty fell from 38.6% in 1990 to 13.7% in 2006, and education, health care and pensions are now much more widely available. Public-private partnerships have built the best infrastructure in the region. Chile is widely held up as a model for Latin America, a status underlined this week by an invitation to join the OECD, a rich-country club.

For all of this the Concertación deserves much credit. It kept the free-market economic policies adopted, with costly trial and error, by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. To these it added greater fiscal and monetary rigour, better social policy and a concern with equality of opportunity. It gradually turned Chile into a proper democracy, in which dozens of the dictatorship’s army officers are now in jail for murder…(continue reading)