Argentina in the first ten months of 2006 exported 376.000 tons of rice valued at 98 million dollars US dollars, half of which to Mercosur partner Brazil, which is also its main trading partner.
Chile's Consumer Prices Index, IPC, ended at 2.6% in 2006 with a last 0.1% push from December, according to the latest release from the country's Statistics Institute, INE.
Argentina has filed a dispute complaint against Chile before the World Trade Organization (WTO) after Chile in mid December imposed a 23-percent additional safeguard on some dairy products imported from Argentina.
China's central bank under international pressure to make the yuan more flexible will in 2007 pursue a stable currency policy to promote economic growth.
Uruguay's Minister of Economy Danilo Astori announced Wednesday the country's economy would expand 4.6% in 2007, after having finished the third year running of expansion above the region's average.
Argentina's stock market ended 2006 with an unprecedented yearly average increase of 35 percent which placed it among the world's top ten performers, the Argentine Institute for Capital Markets (IAMC, in its Spanish acronym), said in a report. Several other world markets also reached record highs.
Latinamerican currencies are expected to begin 2007 with the same upward tendency as during the end of 2006 as foreign investors' flock to emerging markets.
The latest release from the Brazilian Central Bank, based on private sector estimates, downgraded to 2.74% the 2006 GDP expansion. For 2007 the estimate among a hundred leading business men and analysts is that the economy will grow 3.5%.
While the government praised it as reinstating certainty, some savers saw it as the end of a nightmare and banks continue mum and mulling its possible implications, law experts said that the Supreme Court ruling that ordered banks on Wednesday to reimburse savers in pesos dollar deposits frozen during Argentina's 2001 economic debacle, was fairly reasonable.
The planned purchase by Standard Bank †South Africa's largest private bank by assets †of most of US' Bank of America Corp.'s BankBoston Argentina assets, marks the first large investment by a foreign player in the sector since Argentina's 2001-2002 economic meltdown, and an attention call for competitors, banking sources told MercoPress.