MERCOSUR

Mercosur inked trade agreements with Bolivia, Chile, Israel, and Peru in its first decade, while trade within the bloc jumped from $4 billion in 1990 to more than $40 billion in 2000. The group also began trade negotiations with the European Union in 1999. Those talks stalled for many years, but they have regained momentum in recent years. Regional integration began to slow following Brazil’s currency devaluation in 1999 and Argentina’s financial crisis in 2001, and since then trade disputes and other tensions have flared between the two countries. In 2011 Argentina cancelled automatic licensing for hundreds of imports, causing delays at ports and contributing to a 15 percent decline in Brazilian exports over the next year. Mercosur countries have also failed to coordinate their trade policies toward third countries. For instance, Brazil unilaterally imposed antidumping restrictions on steel imports from China in 2011. “Politically negotiated exceptions to the blo...

Mercosur region is highly urbanized, containing some megalopolis such as Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. These global cities are impo rtant trade centers, an d that is the reason why Argentina and Brazil are much more influential in Mercosur than the other countries.  Mercosur has a population of 264,347,840 inhabitants and has its headquarters in Montevideo, Uruguay. The bloc has a total area of 13,771,194km 2  and its nominal GDP is about US$4.437 trillion in 2018. Its HDI in 2017 was 0.772 which is actually a high value.  Natural resources Forestry is a major economic activity for tropical South America, especially the Amazon River basin. Lumber for trees such as mahogany and rosewood is exported to foreign markets for use in cabinets and floors. Lower-grade woods are important to the construction in South America. Eucalyptus is the most familiar of these less-expensive woods and despite not being native to South America, it grows at an incredib...

The creation of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) has had an obvious economic repercussion: an increase in trade within the region, a higher level of intra-bloc competence, the use of scale economies, intra-regional cooperation concerning innovation projects, economic complementation and finally, the creation of an important synergy. However, even though its emphasis is put on the economic aspects, the organization has also had a political, social and cultural relevance (for instance, it has already been mentioned above that the organization has some common challenges and goals regarding education). The political aspects or characteristics about Mercosur are some shared elements between its members. For example, besides being geographically close, they share historical and cultural bonds as well as essential values such as the preservation of democracy as their political system (nowadays these countries are living their longest democratic experience), the socio-economic d...

Mercosur (Southern Common Market) is a trade organization of the South American region . In short words, it’s considered the 1 st trade bloc in South America, the 4 th in the world (after NAFTA; the EU and Japan) and the greatest food producer; furthermore, it has established economic agreements and treaties of free trade with many countries from around the world.   The creation of Mercosur was a process of economic integration, as a strategy to strengthen the economic development within the region by integrating in a common space or market geographically close countries which complemented their respective economies. That’s to say, this process of regionalism combines multilateral forces which modify the member’s economy and make them able to obtain a greater political and economic profit than if they developed their activities isolated from the rest. To exemplify this, since the creation of the organization until today, Mercosur’s members have experienced a growth in thei...

Nowadays, Mercosur is not the only trade organization in South America. We can also find others like the Andean Community, the CARICOM (Caribbean Community) or the ALBA-TCP (Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty). In this section, some main differences and similarities between Mercosur and the ALBA-TCP will be explained. *Suspended country ** Country in process of integration Source: Mercosur.int Source: Alterinfo.net Countries and languages The ALBA is constituted by Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Venezuela (Ecuador made part of it in the past), as we can see in the second picture. Mercosur, as it has already been explained and as we can see in the first picture, is constituted by Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay (Venezuela is currently suspended from its membership and Bolivia is in the process of integration, so it...

The references are in APA format. Books Arnaud, V. (1996).  Mercosur: UE, NAFTA y los procesos de integración regional . Buenos Aires: Abeledo-Perrot The book, written by an Argentinian politologist specialised in international relations, contains lots of information about the cooperation between the members of Mercosur and also makes a comparison between Mercosur and the EU or NAFTA. Barraza, A., & Jardel, S. (1998).  Mercosur: aspectos jurídicos y económicos  (pp. 91-166). Buenos Aires: Ediciones Ciudad Argentina. This book explains the main economic features of the region. However, as it’s dated from 1998 (20 years back), we can only use its information to talk about the initial trade patterns between the countries but not about their current exchanges. Díaz Barrado, C. (2009).  Contribuciones de la educación a la integración regional: el caso del Mercosur educativo (pp. 13-20). [Madrid]: Plaza y Valdés. This book explains the e...