A joint post by Prof. Carlo Pietrobelli and Beatriz Calzada. Since the mid-1990s, Latin American countries have become an attractive destination for foreign mining investment — largely thanks to established regulatory frameworks that provide legal stability and security of mining ownership, as well as incentives for exploration and exploitation. This process led to major investments in the metals sector, mainly by international firms. However, despite this growth in mining activity, there ...
Latin American countries have long been major exporters of mineral resources and are therefore some of the main recipients of mining investments. It is no surprise, then, that the region showed strong economic performance during the last commodity boom super-cycle. However, there are few world-class, highly-innovative mining firms in the region – as are found in Australia and Canada. Against this backdrop, UNU-MERIT and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) are researching how Latin American...
‘Public Policy & Governance Beyond Borders’ is the guiding theme of this year’s Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) international conference, to be held in Brussels on 13-14 July 2017. We are now delighted to announce that MGSoG/UNU-MERIT (Maastricht University, NL) and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (Syracuse University, USA) will be academic co-hosts of the event. In this capacity, UNU-MERIT will offer up to four minority sc...
Many countries with large reserves of natural resources have failed to achieve higher living standards – countries like Brazil, Chile, South Africa and Peru. Can too much of a good thing be somehow ‘bad’ for the wealth and welfare of countries? The debate has raged on for decades. On the one hand, the ‘pessimistic’ view says that a relative abundance of resources is a ‘curse’ for development: since it produces incentives to rent-seeking behaviour and lack of knowledge linkages with the rest of t...