Canning Papers

Latin America's regional and international alliances could offer valuable opportunities for UK trade and engagement with the region. In this Canning Paper, Latin America's major trade alliances are examined to determine their effectiveness and potential for further development.

Ten years on from the launch of the Canning Agenda, Canning House have undertaken a review of its progress in order to establish how successful it has been since its introduction, and to identify what needs to be done to accelerate the progress of a revitalised relationship between Latin America and the UK.

In December 2017, Canning House published a paper outlining the potential for ‘smart cities’ in Latin America. Two years later, this paper assesses how the smart cities story has evolved.

Brazilian construction company Odebrecht’s admission in 2016 that it had bribed
public officials across Latin America over a decade to secure contracts led to the
jailing of more than 130 officials and business people in Brazil by November 2018.
Even incumbent and former presidents have fallen as a result of the scandal.
The public has become increasingly disenchanted with democratic politics, as
governments are perceived to be self-serving and corrupt.

Politics is changing in Latin America. The so-called ‘pink tide’ of left-wing governments, associated with a decade of booming commodity prices, has peaked and ebbed. In the aftermath voters are angry over the slowdown in economic growth, corruption, and crime. In some countries the political pendulum has swung to the Right, or even to the extreme Right. Populist and nationalist politicians of both the Right and Left have made gains. The picture is not uniform. In this paper we will try to get a feel for the direction of travel and how it is affecting business

There is widespread agreement that the economies of Latin America and the Caribbean are not growing fast enough. There are many reasons for this, among them the end of the commodities boom, large fiscal deficits, corruption, the electoral cycle, and high levels of political uncertainty. While the exact role each of these factors has played is open to debate, it is also true that low growth can be traced back to a simple and at first sight rather more technical issue: low levels of investment, particularly in infrastructure.