A new issue of CEPAL Magazinethe main academic publication of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, is now available online, with ten articles by leading professors and researchers on various economic, social and environmental aspects of several countries in the region.
Issue No. 142 of the journal (corresponding to April 2024) can be downloaded free of charge from the ECLAC website and includes topics such as the ecological stock-flow for Central America, the effects of climate change on Colombia’s current account, and the debate between Celso Furtado and Maria da Conceição Tavares on foreign capital and national development, among other studies.
In the article entitled “A model stock-ecological flow for Central America”, Lorenzo Nalin, a researcher at the Faculty of Economics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Esteban Pérez Caldentey, Coordinator of the Development Financing Unit of the Economic Development Division of ECLAC, Leonardo Rojas, a researcher at the Socioeconomics, Institutions and Development Group of the National University of Colombia, and Giuliano Toshiro Yajima, an academic researcher at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, present a stock-flow model consistent with an ecological module for the Central American economies with the aim of revealing and explaining general macroeconomic trends in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The model is based on a set of stylized facts and includes five institutional sectors (consumers, companies, government, central bank and rest of the world) and seven financial assets: i) public debt issued in national and foreign currency, ii) private debt issued in national currency, iii) debt issued by the rest of the world, iv) loans from banks to the private sector for investment and consumer credit, v) public and private deposits, vi) loans from the rest of the world to the national financial sector and vii) cash.
In the article “Expected effects of climate change on Colombia’s current account,” Camila Agudelo-Rivera, Research Analyst at the Colombian Banking and Financial Institutions Association, and Clark Granger-Castaño and Andrés Sánchez-Jabba, Economists at the Bank of the Republic of Colombia in Bogotá, examine the expected effects of climate change on Colombia’s current account. To do so, a forecast of the current account balance through 2050 is made under different climate scenarios in order to determine whether the impact of related risks could affect the country’s current account in the long term.
The results indicate that if net-zero emissions were achieved by 2050 instead of maintaining current climate policies, the current account deficit could widen by the equivalent of 4.6% of GDP. If the transition were delayed, the cost would be equivalent to 2.6% of GDP. This result can be attributed to the permanent fall in oil prices and the expansion of public debt that would occur due to the decrease in global demand for fossil fuels and the additional spending aimed at meeting environmental objectives.
Meanwhile, in the article “Foreign Capital and National Development in the Debate between Celso Furtado and Maria da Conceição Tavares (1964-1982)”, Alisson Oliveira de Souza Carvalho, a PhD student in Economic Development at the Institute of Economics of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, and Fabio Antonio de Campos, Professor and PhD from the Institute of Economics at the same university, analyze foreign capital and national development in the debate between Celso Furtado and Maria da Conceição Tavares between 1964 and 1982. To do so, they investigate how Furtado’s analytical radicalization after the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil allowed her a pioneering interpretation of the transnationalization of capital in Latin America and the Caribbean, despite the criticism she received from Tavares regarding her stagnationist thesis.
Furthermore, although Tavares was recognized as the winner in the debate with Furtado, in this article it is possible to understand how her approach failed to delineate the limits of peripheral industrialization in the face of the control of foreign capital in the region.
The latest edition of CEPAL Magazine The book includes a total of 10 articles by renowned academics and international experts. In addition to the studies already mentioned, research is also published on the progressivity and redistributive capacity of the income tax on salaried individuals in El Salvador; the evolution of monetary transfers in Colombia; the challenges and strategic possibilities of Brazil’s insertion in global value chains; and an input-output analysis of the cases of Brazil and Mexico on the sectoral composition, export trading partners and added value, among other topics.
Readers are reminded that the opinions expressed in the articles published in the Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECLAC.
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