Can Latin America Learn from Developing Asia’s Focused FDI Policies?

This paper argues that foreign direct investment (FDI) can make a very important contribution to development. The nature and level of benefits for developing countries and transition economies from FDI has become a much more controversial topic. While the accelerated growth of surging Asian economies, especially China, suggest that FDI in the right circumstances can be considered an important ingredient for economic advance, the debate over technological and other spillovers from FDI has shifted decisively against the existing presumptions regarding ‘automatic’ FDI benefits to the point of questioning their very existence based on East European and Latin American experiences. As a consequence, more and more developing countries and transition economies now make significant efforts to compete to attract ‘quality’ FDI at the same time that they also seek to ensure that they effectively benefit from the FDI they receive. To understand this phenomenon, this paper examines existing statistical information on FDI and the operations of transnational corporations (TNC) in the context of the new global political economy in which developing countries and transition economies are becoming much more assertive. In this new setting many developing countries and transition economies see themselves as needing general FDI less but wanting quality FDI more. For these reasons, developing countries and transition economies are increasingly prone to use active and focused policies to both attract quality or priority FDI and to ensure that the benefits from such coincide with their developmental priorities.(Please Puchase For Further Reading)Foreign direct investment, transnational corporations, industrial policy, development

Outward investment by Trans-Latin enterprises: reasons for optimism

Despite the global crisis, outward FDI by Latin American firms grew by more than 40% in 2008. The picture for 2009 is less clear, due to the expected regional GDP contraction, falling commodity prices, and tightening credit markets. Nonetheless, the authors argue that many countervailing factors make Latin American investment more resilient in the crisis than other regions may be

Colombia: un CANálisis de su competitividad internacional

En 1996, el comercio de bienes y servicios de la región en su conjunto evolucionó, acorde con la tendencia, hacia una progresiva internacionalización de la economía de América Latina y el Caribe observada a partir de 1992, fenómeno que se ha manifestado en dos aspectos: un aumento del volumen del comercio superior al del producto y una expansión de las importaciones más acelerada que de las exportaciones. En Colombia, la balanza comercial de bienes ha venido registrando un saldo negativo y cada vez mayor desde 1993. En 1995, Colombia acumuló un déficit comercial equivalente a poco más del 3% del PIB lo que se repitió en 1996. Las exportaciones en 1996 se incrementaron en 5.2% con respecto del año anterior, pero las importaciones a pesar de decrecer en 1.3% con respecto del año anterior, fueron en 18.57% superiores al valor total exportado. Esto llevó a un déficit comercial de 1 998.2 millones de dólares. Este informe está dedicado al análisis de la competitividad de Colombia y se desarrolla en 5 secciones. En las dos primeras se analiza el comportamiento del comercio internacional en los países de América Latina y el Caribe y de Colombia en los últimos años. En la tercera sección se presentan algunas de las formas de medir la competitividad internacional de un país. Finalmente, en las dos últimas, se evalúa el desempeño competitivo de las exportaciones colombianas mediante la estimación de indicadores cuantitativos adecuados que midan, en esencia, la dinámica de su penetración en diversos mercados de referencia. El ejercicio abarca el período 1980- 1996 y se realizó sobre la base del programa de computación Análisis de la competitividad de los países (CANPLUS) de la CEPAL. El informe muestra que la participación de mercado de los productos colombianos se ha mantenido casi constante a través de los 5 mercados analizados, exceptuando al mercado de América Latina donde en el período 1980-1996 se aprecia un crecimiento del 40%. Se observa que la estructura de sus exportaciones indica un predominio de los recursos naturales sobre las manufacturas en relación de 4 a 1, excepto en el mercado de América Latina donde la relación se invierte pasando a 1 a 2 aproximadamente. Asimismo las exportaciones de manufacturas muestran un fuerte componente de aquellas no basadas en recursos naturales en el mercado de América Latina, lo cual no sucede en los otros mercados analizados. Si se analizan las principales exportaciones de Colombia se observa que éstas corresponden a recursos naturales predominando las de café, petróleo y carbón. Este predominio desaparece en el mercado de América Latina donde predominan productos químicos, farmacéuticos y artículos de confección, es decir, manufacturas no basadas en recursos naturales. Por último, la estructura de sus exportaciones muestra una alta concentración en sectores estacionarios del comercio internacional (estrellas menguantes y retrocesos), excepto en el mercado de América Latina donde la concentración se sitúa en sectores dinámicos del comercio internacional (estrellas nacientes: 47%).

Youth Farming and Nigeria's Development Dilemma: The Shonga Experiment

Youth farming is undergoing a transformation in Nigeria as the incentive framework for small?scale farming changes. Rural?urban migration, rural poverty, education and the new opportunities it affords, and technological change are among the drivers of this transformation. Meanwhile, as the demand for food commodities increases with urbanisation, an exodus of labour from the countryside threatens food sufficiency at the national level. Agrarian policy faces a difficult threefold choice between state?supported large?scale commercial farming, training young farmers for small?scale commercial farming, and continuing present policies of improving incentive structures for small?scale peasant farmers. In Kwara State, the Shonga experiment in large?scale commercial methods, involving 13 Zimbabwean farmers, is viewed through the lens of youth farming and the necessary transfer of national food provisioning to a new generation of producers. It is found that youth farming is likely to be as dependent on state subsidies as the Zimbabweans are

拉丁美洲企业的外部投资：乐观的原因

尽管在全球金融危机的大环境下，在2008年，拉美企业的FDI 较2007年增长40％以上。 2009年，由于预期地区生产总值收缩，商品价格下跌，以及信贷市场收紧，使得整个形势变得不明朗。然而，作者认为，许多反补贴因素使拉美投资的弹性空间比其他地区的更大

Adapting to drought in the West African Sahel

In the 1970s and 1980s, a fierce debate took place concerning the vulnerability and adaptive practices of farmers and herders in the West African Sahel, and the utility of concepts including ‘adaptation’ to drought. The region has had the most primary research conducted on drought vulnerability and response, and it is referred to as an archetype, notably in work on human security and famine. Some (eg Michael Watt’s ‘Silent Violence’ 1983) painted a gloomy picture of rural life, with farmers beset by brutal commodity markets and extractive governance stretching back over 100 years. Food shortage and famine was, for Watts, created by colonial policies and unequal access to resources. However others, for example Michael Mortimore (author of ‘Adapting to Drought’ 1989) found regardless of these threats households responded (adapted) to drought in innovative and largely successful ways: diversifying into livestock from farming, moving into labouring and small business activity, and finally considering some temporary outmigration to less affected or more affluent regions to provide remittances. Reversible adaptations occurred before less reversible ones. In this chapter we argue that adaptation is socially mediated, not always successful, and is linked into broader political and economic forces. Its utility as a concept is constrained if wedded to Darwinian uses.’Productive Bricolage’ characterizes livelihoods, with different responses pursued at the same time, and for different lengths of time. Development projects can assist community resilience and individual response to food crises, but in unexpected ways. Our findings from fieldwork in Niger, Burkina and Nigeria are discussed and linked to the new preoccupation of the millennium; ‘climate adaptation’. New research on adaptation in semi arid regions urgently needs to learn from this vast reservoir of contextual knowledge in the African drylands, some of it dating back over 40 years

Middle and Late Pleistocene environmental history of the Marsworth area, south-central England

To elucidate the Middle and Late Pleistocene environmental history of south-central England, we report the stratigraphy, sedimentology, palaeoecology and geochronology of some deposits near the foot of the Chiltern Hills scarp at Marsworth, Buckinghamshire. The Marsworth site is important because its sedimentary sequences contain a rich record of warm stages and cold stages, and it lies close to the Anglian glacial limit. Critical to its history are the origin and age of a brown pebbly silty clay (diamicton) previously interpreted as weathered till. The deposits described infill a river channel incised into chalk bedrock. They comprise clayey, silty and gravelly sediments, many containing locally derived chalk and some with molluscan, ostracod and vertebrate remains. Most of the deposits are readily attributed to periglacial and fluvial processes, and some are dated by optically stimulated luminescence to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6. Although our sedimentological data do not discriminate between a glacial or periglacial interpretation of the diamicton, amino-acid dating of three molluscan taxa from beneath it indicates that it is younger than MIS 9 and older than MIS 5e. This makes a glacial interpretation unlikely, and we interpret the diamicton as a periglacial slope deposit. The Pleistocene history reconstructed for Marsworth identifies four key elements: (1) Anglian glaciation during MIS 12 closely approached Marsworth, introducing far-travelled pebbles such as Rhaxella chert and possibly some fine sand minerals into the area. (2) Interglacial environments inferred from fluvial sediments during MIS 7 varied from fully interglacial conditions during sub-stages 7e and 7c, cool temperate conditions during sub-stage 7b or 7a, temperate conditions similar to those today in central England towards the end of the interglacial, and cool temperate conditions during sub-stage 7a. (3) Periglacial activity during MIS 6 involved thermal contraction cracking, permafrost development, fracturing of chalk bedrock, fluvial activity, slopewash, mass movement and deposition of loess and coversand. (4) Fully interglacial conditions during sub-stage 5e led to renewed fluvial activity, soil formation and acidic weathering

Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. We review the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. Using case studies from longitudinal research we demonstrate that assets can afford useful insights into important change