
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro confirmed he will be traveling to Argentina on March 26th for the celebration of Mercosur's 30th anniversary, and also offered support for the president Alberto Fernandez administration negotiations with the IMF.

The shipping company Maersk expects world trade to grow by 3% or more in 2021. The company sees global trade recovering, but there is still a lot of uncertainty about the size of the impact of Covid-19 on the world economy in 2021. So it is implementing a global strategy that positions it for growth in several countries, including Mercosur members.

More than 20 million people were pushed into poverty during pandemic-plagued 2020 across Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.N. economic agency for the region announced this week.

Brazilian soy shipments this month should reach 15 million tons, which could establish a new record for a month, according to the maritime agency Cargonave, considering the 250 ships in the export line-up, a growth of more than 40% compared to the number seen in the same period last year.

By Gita Bhatt (*) – Accelerated by the pandemic, the digital future is coming at us faster than ever before, and maybe faster than we can imagine. In this issue, we explore the possible consequences —the good, the bad, and the gray.

Rising inflation plus bad loans and government regulations anticipate a tough 2021 according to the CEO of Argentina's biggest private bank by market capitalization. “If inflation is high, there is a risk that bank results will fall to very low or negative levels in real terms,” Fabian Kon said in an interview in Buenos Aires.

By Arturo Porzecanski (*) The following was published in the Americas Quarterly, a contribution from a leading emerging-market economist writes. The seeds for the latest chapter in Argentina’s long history of confrontations with the International Monetary Fund were planted about a year ago, on the eve of the global pandemic.

Uruguayan president Luis Lacalle Pou addressed Congress on Tuesday to report on his first year and one day in office, underlining the extraordinary 2020 pandemic year which surprised the world, and Uruguay, but he also made several announcements referred to future activities and investments.

With public finances threatened, Brazil’s Real has suffered as investors adjust to changing liquidity conditions globally, but some of it has not been justified by economic fundamentals, central bank President Roberto Campos Neto said on Tuesday.

Brazil's statistics agency IBGE said on Tuesday the monthly rate of producer price inflation kicked off this year at its second highest, with prices rising across all 24 activities surveyed.