Latin America and Asia Pacific trade and investment relations at a time of international financial crisis

Abstract

The global economic crisis has put an end to a period of worldwide expansion and halted the integration of Latin America and developing Asia with the international economy. Current and expected economic weakness in the advanced economies has led us to look elsewhere for sources of growth. Emerging economies in Asia and Latin America have increased their contributions to world production, finance, and trade in the past decades. In doing so, the two regions have deepened their economic ties with significant implications for the recovery of their respective economies. In this paper we discuss the impact of the crisis on the commercial patterns inside and outside the Forum for East Asia Latin American Cooperation (FEALAC) bloc. We describe the FEALAC economy and identify existing trade and investment structures, and find important structural shortcomings such as a high dependence on inter-industry trade between Asia and Latin America. We argue that this is also an opportunity for greater integration into bi-regional value-added chains and that trade and cooperation between the two regions can be an effective means to counterbalance the adverse effects of the current financial turmoil.