The seventh round of Mercosur/EU trade negotiations held in Montevideo ended with “progress in some areas at regulation and norms levels” and with the commitment of exchanging proposals in mid 2012, according to Joao Aguiar Machado head of the EU team.
Uruguay has become a net creditor of the International Monetary Fund and given this condition has helped in the bailing out of such countries as Ireland and Angola, revealed a top authority of the Central Bank during a hearing before the country’s Senate’s Finance Committee.
In the last eleven days the Argentine Peso has fallen almost 20% in neighbouring Uruguay where it has sounded alarm bells ahead of the coming season when hundreds of thousands of Argentines flood Uruguayan beaches.
Mercosur expectations must be lowered and made to prosper in energy integration, infrastructure and trade, said a Uruguayan leading economist adding that without sounding dramatic “we must follow our interests”.
Uruguay is the best place to live in Latin America according to the Legatum Institute fourth year index on quality of life conditions which ranks 110 countries world wide representing 90% of world population and 97% of the global economy.
A top Uruguayan official said the country has the support of Brazil regarding the controversy triggered when President Nicholas Sarkozy as host and ‘rapporteur’ of the recent G20 summit named Uruguay in the list of the world’s most notorious fiscal havens.
Uruguay’s President, José Mujica said on Monday that Argentina had nothing to do with the comment made by France’s leader Nicolas Sarkozy indicating that Uruguay was a “tax haven.”
The French ambassador in Montevideo, Jean Christophe Potton said that when President Nicholas Sarkozy named Uruguay and ten other countries as ‘fiscal havens’, which could be isolated from the International community, he was speaking in representation of the G20 countries summit in Cannes.
Opposition leaders in Uruguay accused Argentina of “exerting pressure inside the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)” so the neighbouring country would be labelled a “tax haven,” the Montevideo media said.
Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have the highest standards of living in Latin America according the latest report from the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI).