Interviews
Information and Communication (SICOM) for the development of Paraguay, which currently holds the UNASUR Pro Tempore Presidency, to create a South American Media Network, will also help the region’s countries to disseminate and exchange contents and programs. Improvements in infrastructure and regional connectivity are an important agenda for integration. However, this dimension clearly cannot work if it is divorced from trade flows and investment at intraregional level. Do you feel that the countries of South America are making simultaneous progress on both fronts? How do you see the linkages between these different levels: infrastructure, trade, and investment? To take the second part of your question first, allow me to draw a very simple comparison: if we’re talking about a computer, the hardware -the structural part- corresponds to the construction of physical works; the software -the programs- is equivalent to the initiatives flow through the infrastructure’s network. Although both elements are required to operate the computer, you also need a broadband connection to be able to log on to the global network -ideally a mobile connection. This would be tantamount to developing a common language, coordination between the services in border areas, coordination at the level of currency transactions, tariff agreements, and so on. So we need our public policies to be harmonized under an integrating outlook.
Our leaders are very much aware of this, and it was much in evidence in July last year, when UNASUR’s Council of Heads of State and Government requested an urgent meeting of the Economy and Finance Council made up of our ministers and central bank governors to define actions to safeguard our monetary reserves (about US$700 billion), to evaluate how to increase our intraregional trade, which today stands at 24% of total trade, through a new financial architecture -a step beyond- with the Bank of the South and the Single System for Regional Compensation (SUCRE) as pillars. Three working groups were set up to make progress on these issues and, at the last meeting of the Working Group on Financial Integration (GTIF), held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on February 16, a mandate was handed to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to conduct studies to evaluate the existing information for these three issues. In regard to extraregional trade and investment, it is important to remember that, if there’s something that characterizes the world over the past 20 or 30 years, it’s the movement on the Asian axis and, more recently, China’s entrance as a major player in the global economy. According to ECLAC’s data, that weight is particularly evident in South America: during the first quarter of 2011, trade between China and Latin America grew 44% to US$47.9 billion. The Asian giant is the most important trading partner for both Brazil and Chile, and the second most important for Argentina and Peru. It’s a mystery to no one that the South American economies show different degrees of openness to the outside world: some, which started up several decades ago, have maintained a profuse network of trade agreements and used these as part of their international insertion in what has been referred to as “open regionalism”; others have favored more limited opening, favoring greater industrialization, with a higher degree of protection, particularly driven by the
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// Volume 16 // January-June 2012
@ journal
Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (IDB-INTAL). All rights reserved.
However, in the strictly economic and trade field, the current international environment is characterized by instability and unpredictability, which means we have to work as a team.
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