Geography
Mercosur
Mercosur is a South American trade bloc established in 1991 to promote economic integration and cooperation among its member countries. Its primary goals include the elimination of trade barriers and the facilitation of economic development within the region. Mercosur's member countries include Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with additional associate members and observer countries.
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eBook - ePubThe Reconfiguration of Twenty-first Century Latin American Regionalism
Actors, Processes, Contradictions and Prospects
- Rowan Lubbock, Ernesto Vivares, Rowan Lubbock, Ernesto Vivares(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
For these authors, the history of Latin American regionalism begins and ends with European integration and the institutional schemes formulated around this experience (see Vivares & Dolcetti-Marcolini, 2015). Some of these works stress the role of agency, focusing on the concentration of power in the executive and the hyper-presidential style of the governments of the region (Carranza, 2003 ; Kaltenthaler & Mora, 2002 ; Malamud, 2013), 1 others, such as Pezzola (2018) highlight the importance of national lobbies and other domestic groups in defining or shaping national positions. 2 Finally, authors such as Caichiolo (2017) centre on the need to promote civil society participation in regional decision-making processes, which, like the Mercosur parliament, would help generate regional interests and preferences beyond the national interest. A second area of scholarship sheds light on the factors linked to Mercosur’s social and economic structure. Burges (2008), for instance, speaks of the low level of productive interdependence between the region’s economies, measured in trade, investment and/or physical interconnection, while others, such as Doctor (2013), point to the broader structural and competitive asymmetries that separate member countries. Finally, authors such as Blyde (2006) show that this initial asymmetry, measured in income distribution, was expanded throughout Mercosur and was largely a consequence of measures taken or omitted by governments at the regional level. 3 In contrast, this article offers a more critical historical perspective on the formation and evolution of Mercosur. Firstly, I frame the analysis of Mercosur as part of a broader and longer-term collective construction process, recognizing the importance of the global context in its current trajectory
eBook - PDFRegional Environmental Cooperation in South America
Processes, Drivers and Constraints
- Karen M. Siegel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
At the same time as these regional organisations within South America developed, the US sought to promote its interests in the region by promoting the idea of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Although economic objectives were clearly predominant during the 1990s, they were never- theless not the only objectives of regional cooperation. Regional cooper- ation on issues other than trade, including the environment and sustainability, has been promoted strongly by the EU, and European agencies have provided substantial aid to Mercosur in an attempt to project the EU’s model of regional integration in other parts of the world 3 FROM “OPEN” TO “POST-HEGEMONIC” REGIONALISM 65 (Grugel 2004; Lenz 2012, 161–162). Yet, over time disagreements between European visions of regional integration in the Southern Cone and those of the Southern Cone countries have become evident. It has thus become clear that there is little political will to strengthen Mercosur and create supranational institutions similar to those of the EU and spillover from economic integration to other policy areas has remained much more limited than in the European case. Instead, the regional organisation has been kept alive by the direct intervention of presidents (Malamud 2015). The evolution of Mercosur is particularly interesting because initially it seemed like a promising framework for regional environmental coopera- tion. However, although there is a relatively high level of institutionalisa- tion of environmental cooperation in the Mercosur framework, the agendas of the relevant institutions have changed frequently while their resources have been restricted, dialogue with regional civil society networks working on socio-environmental concerns has been limited, and Mercosur has not been given the mandate to deal with some of the region’s most important socio-environmental concerns. As a consequence, the relevance of Mercosur for environmental cooperation in the region has declined over time.
Available until 31 Dec |Learn moreNative Peoples, Politics, and Society in Contemporary Paraguay
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
- Barbara A. Ganson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- University of New Mexico Press(Publisher)
Beyond the Treaty of Asunción Mercosur is part of an enduring vision of a larger, unified Latin America. The Treaty of Asunción provided for both the addition of new members and the ability of the group to join other regional integration projects. 9 Since the 1990s, new members have been added and existing memberships have been challenged. A regional market of about US$641 billion in 1991 has grown to include six countries representing a market of about $3.15 trillion. This is roughly the same size as the German economy, one of the top five in the world. The treaty also provided an ambitious agenda for deepening integration over time. It envisioned the free movement of not only goods and services but also factors of production. And while it made immediate provisions for tariff reductions, it also created long lists of exceptions and a number of exemptions from the common external tariff (CET). These would be the subject of auto-matic elimination over time as well as ongoing negotiation. The inability of the member countries to establish a more coherent CET has been the subject of much discussion and Mercosur pessimism. And while the treaty anticipated coordinated macroeconomic and sectoral policies and even the creation of a common currency, such a level of economic integration still seems to lie far in the future. Regional integration agreements are often evaluated or discussed in terms of their tendency to broaden their scope or deepen their reach. For Paraguay, the ability of Mercosur to expand the scope of its market has been key to defining the success of the agreement. This small economy, far from major world markets, appreciated the potential advantage in opening borders to trade and investment. Coordinating sovereign prerogatives with its larger neighbors was more prob-lematic.
eBook - PDFRegion-building
Vol. I: The Global Proliferation of Regional Integration
- Ludger Kühnhardt(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Berghahn Books(Publisher)
Much of Mercosur’s intra-regional trade could also be described as inter-industry trade on a regional level. Companies are swapping products or components of products across the region. For 1995, the estimate of Argentina’s Latin America and the Caribbean | 141 share in inter-industry trade as part of its overall intra-regional trade was 50 percent; for Brazil it was 85 percent. 124 Regardless of such hairsplitting details (which are of no relevance for economists anyway), regional integration has turned out to be beneficial for the region’s economy as it provides it with a larger market for production, labor, and consumption. The increase of intra-regional merger and acquisition operations indicates the same trend. Cross-border trans-actions during the first decade of Mercosur constituted 18 percent of all merger and acquisition operations in the region. (2) In terms of Mercosur solidifying its reputation, it helped that foreign direct investment increased visibly during the first years of its existence. MERCO-SUR’s jump in foreign direct investment from $2.8 billion in 1990 to $32.5 bil-lion in 1998 helped to put the subsequent effects of the Argentinean crisis into clearer perspective. The free movement of goods covers 90 percent of all intra-Mercosur trade of around 9,000 products. The exceptions are telling as far as national economic interests are concerned. While Mercosur was never free from disputes among its member states over free trade issues, the overall advantage of regional cooperation and integration has gradually helped to draw institutional conclusions for deeper integration. In 2002, with the signing of the Protocol of Olivos, Mercosur introduced a dispute settlement scheme and established the Mercosur Permanent Court of Review in Asuncion, along with a Mercosur Center for Promoting the Rule of Law.
- Paweł Frankowski, Artur Gruszczak, Pawe? Frankowski, Artur Gruszczak, Pawe? Frankowski, Pawe? Frankowski, Pawe? Frankowski, Pawe? Frankowski, Pawe? Frankowski, Paweł Frankowski(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Two main concerns drove economic integration in Mercosur: improving domestic economic development and interdependence, on the one hand, and boosting the region’s economic position in the global economy on the other hand. As part of the first rationale, Mercosur was a means for Argentina and Brazil to trade freely within and outside of South America, locking in the principles of the Washington consensus: deregulation, liberalization and privatization (Meissner 2017, p. 152). Economic development was seen as crucial for the region and its stability (Oelsner 2009). As part of the second rationale, which was much more important to the region due to its dependence on extra-regional trade (Meissner 2017), Argentina and especially Brazil feared marginalization in the global economy, which was increasingly characterized by globalization and global value chains (Buzan and Waever 2003, p. 325). Brazil repeatedly emphasized that Mercosur boosts the region’s and its own country’s global visibility, making the region more attractive to foreign investors and trade partners (Meissner 2017)—such extra-regional economic relations were and are still vital for South America. Therefore Mercosur’s member states set up the customs union in 1994 which was supposed to lock in liberal reforms, attract investments and trade partners as well as improve the region’s visibility and bargaining power on the international stage. A second set of security ideas, next to economic concerns, revolved around domestic and transnational security in South America. These domestic and transnational threats subsume a large set of security aspects, including consolidation of democracy, the fight against corruption, trafficking of drugs, persons and weapons, terrorism as well as transnational organized crime (Oelsner 2011 ; Weiffen et al. 2013, p. 378 f.). Focusing on democratic stability, this was a crucial factor in the integration dynamics of Mercosur
- E. Graham(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
2 Some of these are still subject to special regimes, notably the automotive sector. The recent history of Mercosur – and in particular, the CET – has been troubled by macroeconomic difficulties in Argentina and Brazil. Thus, since 1998 the CET has been changed twice: first, when Brazil raised it by 3 points in response to the 1998 financial crisis (followed by the other partners); and second, in 2001, when Argentina launched a package of measures in order to improve its export competitiveness – and was again followed by Uruguay and Paraguay. 148 FDI, Trade and Integration in Mercosur Moreover, these countries are involved in other regional negotiations; in particular, the FTAA (the Free Trade Area of the Americas), the FTA with the European Union, and an FTA with the Andean Community (CAN). On the one hand, the FTAA negotiations, which were initially conducted by individual national governments, have forced Mercosur countries to reconsider the pertinence of maintaining a small and imperfect Common Market in the context of a larger regional FTA. On the other hand, the European and Andean FTAs tend to reinforce Mercosur because the nego- tiations are between groups of countries rather than between individual governments. Also, intra-regional tariff reduction in the first part of the 1990s coin- cided with unilateral liberalization programmes negotiated separately by each of the member states. More fundamentally, the implementa- tion of Mercosur occurred in a context of a large adjustment process and deep economic reforms that pointed out important changes in the devel- opment strategies of the Latin-American countries. In addition, those countries also undertook measures of financial liberalization, includ- ing major deregulation of controls on capital flows. Another important feature of this process has been domestic deregulation and the privat- ization of formerly state-owned enterprises.
eBook - ePubThe Routledge Handbook to Global Political Economy
Conversations and Inquiries
- Ernesto Vivares(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
60 Between 2003 and 2008, Paraguayan president Nicanor Duarte did not share these ideological standpoints with his Mercosur presidential counterparts. This radically changed in 2008 with the arrival of Fernando Lugo to the Paraguayan presidency, who completed Mercosur’s ‘left-turn’ that characterised it between 2003 and 2015, when the new Argentinian and Brazilian presidents showed a new ideological shift to the right, once again backing free-market economics and relegating Mercosur to a lesser priority level.61 Söderbaum 2004: 96–98.62 Arguably, Mercosur’s Fund for Structural Convergence was created in 2004 with the aim of reducing the asymmetries between the bloc members, and though issues of social development are included as funding targets, its creation derived from the process of developing the social area that began in the early 2000s, instead of having inspired it.Bibliography
Ayala, E. 2013. El origen del nombre América Latina y la tradición católica del siglo XIX. Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 40, no. 1: 213–241.Bethell, L. 2010. Brazil and ‘Latin America’. Journal of Latin American Studies 42, no. 3: 457–485.Caetano, G. 2011. Breve historia del Mercosur en sus 20 años. Coyunturas e instituciones (1991–2011). In: Mercosur: 20 años. Caetano, G. (coord.) Ch. 1. Montevideo: Centro de Formación para la Integración Regional.Cammack, Paul. 1999. Mercosur: From Domestic Concerns to Regional Influence. In: Sub-regionalism and World Order. Hook, G. and Kearns, I. (eds) Ch 5. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Checkel, J. 2001. Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change. International Organization 55, no. 3: 553–588.Checkel, J. 2016. Regional Identities and Communities. In: The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism. Börzel, T. and Risse, T. (eds) Ch 24. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Ermida, O. 2003. La dimensión social de Mercosur. Derecho y Sociedad 21: 127–153.Gardini, G. 2010. The Origins of Mercosur. Democracy and Regionalization in South America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Geneyro, R. and Vázquez, M. 2006. La ampliación de la agenda política y social para el Mercosur actual. Aldea Mundo
eBook - PDFThe World Today
Concepts and Regions in Geography
- Jan Nijman, Peter O. Muller, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Nonetheless, things are moving in the right direction. With mutually advantageous trade the catalyst, a new continent‐wide spirit of cooperation is blossoming at every level. Cross‐border rail, road, and pipeline projects, stalled for years, are multiplying steadily. And importantly, investments now flow more freely than ever from one country to another, most notably in the agricultural sector. Recognizing that free trade may well be able to solve many of the realm’s economic‐geographic problems, governments are now pursuing multiple avenues of heightened international coopera- tion. This is a good example of the concept of supranational- ism 10 , which geographers define as a voluntary association in economic, political, or cultural spheres of three or more indepen- dent countries willing to yield some measure of sovereignty for their mutual benefit (a concept elaborated in Chapter 4). In 2015, South America’s republics were affiliating with a number of trading blocs, of which the following two are the most important: • Mercosur/l (Mercosur in Spanish; Mercosul in Portuguese): Launched in 1995, this Common Market established a free‐ trade zone and customs union that now links Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela (five additional western South American countries are associate members). The organi- zation aspires to be the dominant free trade association for all of South America, but political agendas tend to prevail over eco- nomic needs. As a result, the path toward full economic integra- tion is proving to be both slow‐paced and obstacle‐ridden. • Pacific Alliance (PA): Inaugurated in 2012, this new bloc was founded by Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile.
eBook - PDF- Marcilio Toscano Franca Filho, Lucas Lixinski, María Belén Olmos Giupponi, Marcilio Toscano Franca Filho, Lucas Lixinski, María Belén Olmos Giupponi(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Hart Publishing(Publisher)
Furthermore, the Sub-Saharan region also remains a black spot, despite the many regional endeavours. If anything, Mercosur is perceived as an exemplary case from which to draw lessons for regional organisations such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC). 7 Laursen, Comparative Regional Integration (n 5) 283. 8 P Hugon (ed), Les é conomies en d é veloppement à l’heure de la r é gionalisation (Paris, Karthala, 2002). 168 Philippe de Lombaerde, Frank Mattheis and Charlotte Vanfraechem IV Origins of Regional Integration With respect to Mercosur, a first set of comparative papers deals with the origins of the regional integration processes. They differ with respect to the factors and variables the authors consider as key explanatory factors. A recent historical comparison between the European Union and Mercosur is presented by Hardt. He compares regional integration processes by singling out two preconditions for regional integration efforts. In his view, the first condition for an integration effort is the presence of traditional rivalries that threaten regional stability. 9 While the European Union offered an opportunity to supersede the historically problem-atic relationship between France and Germany, Mercosur is essentially seen as a compromise between Brazil and Argentina. 10 Both the European Union and Mercosur faced threats of aggression. According to Hardt, a second precondition for regional cooperation is the presence of a market failure. In post-war Europe, the market had to be completely rebuilt; in the Mercosur case, the massive failure of economic policy resulted in a debt crisis and created deep and definitive market failures for Brazil and Argentina. 11 In contrast to the European Union and Mercosur, NAFTA and ASEAN are trade blocs without defined goals of deeper integration. 12 Guedes de Oliveira offers a slightly different perspective.
eBook - PDFNeoliberalism and Neopanamericanism
The View from Latin America
- G. Prevost, C. Oliva, G. Prevost, C. Oliva(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Besides, Mercosur does not fit that clear distribution of assignments. If, on the one hand, it is a subject duly dealt with and coordinated by the Foreign Affairs, on the other hand, its effects are closely linked to national issues. As integration deepens, Mercosur increasingly influences societies’ everyday life, thus requir- ing their representatives clear standing. Since Brazil is the largest among member countries, such influence, yet significant, is proportionally less felt. In such context, political parties in general are scarcely prepared to face new the challenges, having no established position as to the various di- mensions of the process of regional integration. The Brazilian Section of the Mercosur Joint Parliamentary Commission, during the Brazilian Congress’ fiftieth term (1994–1998), was made up by representatives from the biggest national parties (Table 12.1). It is interesting to note that, save two, all representatives come from southern (and a southwestern) states sharing borders with other Mercosur countries; to these must be added the representative from São Paulo who, because of this state’s top ranking in industry and trade, is strongly interested in the matter.The same distribution repeats itself in the Mercosur 253 Table 12.1 Brazilian Representatives and Respective Parties at the Mercosur Joint Parliamentary Commission, 1994–1998 State of the Federation, Region PMDB PMDB PMDB PMDB PFL PFL PFL FPL PPB PPB PPB PPB PSDB PSDB PTB PT Position Representative Source: Comissão Parlamentar Conjunta, 1996.
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