South american economic integration: Less social inequality?

The South American countries, as with ones from the rest of the world have been immersed in the processes of globalization during the last two decades. An emerging question of this context is: How dynamic are these countries in terms of their foreign trade? Regarding this matter, the dates from Economic Commission for Latin America, CEPAL, about South American countries foreign trade show that in the late 1990s, exports increased to US135,000 millions of dollars, which practically doubled the value of the mid first decade of the 21st century; imports, on the other hand, also increased at a lower level, going from US131,000 million to US212,000 million of dollars in the same period. The behavior of the exports and imports has allowed a favorable commercial balance (US90,000 millions of dollars in 2005). Likewise, the variation of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), increased until reaching to 5.8% in 2007, before the international financial crisis1 . There is also improvement in social terms; the poverty population proportion in Latin America was around 33.0% in 2008, an indicator which decreased 10 percentage points in relation to 1999 (including the Central American countries). This paper shows the overview of foreign trade, economic growth and social inequality in South America during the last years. Given the Millennium Development Goals, set by the UNDP, this article seeks to contrast the commercial advancement of South American economies with the results in terms of social inequality. The analysis of key indicators shows that the dynamics of economic integration and foreign trade does not reflect on improving social equity and poverty reduction, therefore, the implementation of policies that target society to achieve this purpose are suggested

• Autores: Aponte Jaramillo, Elizabeth
• Tipo de recurso: Article of journal
• Fecha de publicación: 2012
• Institución: Universidad Autónoma de Occidente
• Repositorio: RED: Repositorio Educativo Digital UAO
• Idioma: eng
• OAI Identifier: oai:red.uao.edu.co:10614/11808
• Acceso en línea: http://red.uao.edu.co//handle/10614/11808
• Palabra clave: América Latina - Integración económica; Desarrollo económico; Latin America- Economic integration; Economic development; Economic integration; Quality of life; Social equality; Poverty
• Rights: openAccess
• License: Derechos Reservados - Universidad Autónoma de Occidente