OBELA Analysis

Central America was the region most affected by the supply and demand crisis in the Americas. However, there was a great disparity in the declines of each country. There are two groups, the first lost less than seven years of production, and the second more than ten.
The lost production years are calculated by comparing real GDP in the second quarter of 2020, when social distancing measures were implemented in the Americas, with the quarterly GDP closest to its value.
In the least affected countries, it was migrant labor and the anchoring with the U.S. economy, via the maquila, that allowed them to lose few years of production and to recover more than half of the lost years.

On 23 June 2016, the people of the United Kingdom (UK) decided to leave the European Union (EU) in a referendum by a margin of less than 2%. After more than four years of negotiations, the Brexit transition period ended on 1 January 2021. The UK's exit from the European Union implies changes in the structure of the world economy.

During the Brexit negotiations, in parallel it signed 59 trade agreements with non-European countries, including the UK-Japan agreement. In Latin America, it also reaffirmed the partners it had via the EU. A key element in the Brexit free trade agreement is that it did not incorporate financial services.

The project of British reindustrialisation and economic independence from Europe, via Brexit, has encountered significant limits in the very high financialisation of its economy, its deep trade dependence and its lack of productive competitiveness.

With the recent formalisation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has the opportunity to access the world's largest economic bloc. It is an opportunity and an alternative for LAC blocs to coordinate and use this new market as a catapult for recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. 

However, in the two centuries of LAC's history, repeated efforts at economic integration and multilateral cooperation have failed to materialise into a project.  Integration has been truncated by a combination of internal factors such as the conflict between the primary-export and industrial sectors and the principle of due obedience that obliges Pan-Americanism.

Ecuador is the most recent example of US interference in the internal politics of the region's countries.