The Latin American and Caribbean region will remember 1998 as one of the most problematic years of recent times. The severe effects of the international financial crisis that broke out in Asia in mid-1997 restricted the region's access to external financing. Tumbling export prices translated into the first drop in the value of the countries' exports to be recorded so far this decade, and this in turn led to a further deterioration in the current account of the balance of payments. Faced with this bleak outlook on the external front, economic authorities displayed a strong determinati…
Resumen El año 1998 será recordado como uno de los años más complejos que ha conocido América Latina y el Caribe en los últimos tiempos. Los efectos de la crisis financiera internacional que comenzó en Asia a mediados de 1997 fueron severos y restringieron el acceso al financiamiento externo. La caída de los precios de las exportaciones se tradujo en una disminución del valor de las ventas externas de los países de la región por primera vez en el presente decenio, que provocó un nuevo deterioro de la cuenta corriente del balance de pagos. Ante este panorama externo sombrío, las autoridades eco…
This study approaches foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America and the Caribbean from a new perspective by analysing the strategies of transitional corporations in an attempt to overcome the limitations of official FDI statistics (whether from destination countries or the main investor countries). This is achieved through a study of the information obtained from research programmes of the Unit on Investment and Corporate Strategies and from information obtained from secondary sources, mainly from specialized financial journals. This approach affords a better understanding of the nature…
En el presente documento se aplica un nuevo enfoque para interpretar la inversión extranjera directa (IED) en América Latina y el Caribe, con el que se intenta superar las limitaciones de las estadísticas oficiales sobre las corrientes de IED (tanto de las economías receptoras como de los principales países inversionistas) a través del análisis de las estrategias de las empresas transnacionales. Esto se logra sobre la base del examen de los antecedentes obtenidos de programas de investigación de la Unidad de Inversiones y Estrategias Empresariales y de fuentes secundarias, sobre todo de la pre…
Summary
In general economic expansion in the Caribbean countries was slightly more robust in 1997 than in the preceding year. However, the rate of growth experienced by the countries surveyed was more uneven than in 1996. The sectors recording strongest performance were tourism, construction and the distributive trades. Agriculture turned in a mixed performance with declining output in Barbados, Jamaica and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS);. The traditional agricultural exports suffered from deteriorating terms of trade while output in the sector as a whole was adversely…
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