Renato Baumann

Regional productive complementarity and competitiveness

A positive international environment favors growth of the several economies in a given region, but it does not assure that the differences in the economic potential of the several countries are reduced in this process. Alternatively, the presence of productive complementarities might foster competitiveness and contribute to increasing the degree of homogeneity, even in situations of adverse terms of trade. This article reviews the experience of six sub-regional groups in Asia and Latin America in the last two decades. Latin America has recently benefitted from significant improvement in terms of trade and yet the economies in that region remain as different in their relative economic potential as they were in the beginning of the 1990s. In Asia, however, the negative impact of terms of trade has not blocked a quite fast pace of GDP growth; furthermore, productive complementarity has led to an increasing convergence of the several economies, with a sharp increase in their share of the international market. There are clear lessons from the Asian experience.

Cooperaçao monetária e financeira: ¿o que é bom para a Asia também é para a América Latina?

Monetary and financial cooperation: what is good to Asian is also good to Latin America?. This article compares the Asian and Latin American experiences with monetary cooperation. It is argued that in the latter such cooperation has hardly progressed, due to low degree of regional integration, the recurrent use of multilateral institutional resources to deal with external shocks and the lack of clear objectives: monetary cooperation is some times seen as a means to foster integration, but also as a means to provide long term funds and as a source of liquidity in foreign currencies. In Asia, differently, cooperation has apparently not been so instrumental to regional integration, but has proven to be quite important as a means to build a regional capital market as well as a mechanism to deal with external shocks.

Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian exports: is the regional market really a source of learning?

In some Latin American countries the exporting activity starts at a regional level, with producers only later venturing into more competitive markets. The implicit risk is that a country might never progress from the regional stage to a more global market. This article compares the experiences of Brazil, China and India. It is shown that Brazil relied on the regional market far more intensely than these Asian countries. There were clear gains accruing to China and India for having exploited more sophisticated markets from the very beginning of their export drive.