Last week, I thoroughly enjoyed a piece in Americas Quarterly on Latin America’s failure at globalization. The article concludes that “a vital but overlooked factor [for Latin America’s stagnation] is the lack of regionalization… within Latin America itself.”
Regional integration is supposed to help individual countries collaborate with their neighbors to shore up their deficiencies and project their strengths. In Latin America, it has taken many forms, but the most common one that comes to mind is that of physical supply chains; building parts in one country, moving them across borders for burly workers (and increasingly robots) to assemble, repackage or refine, and then moving them off to another country.