Javier Santiso - Books & Studies

The Visible Hand of China in Latin America

Latin America is looking towards China and Asia—and China and Asia are looking right back. This is a major shift: for the first time in its history, Latin America can benefit from not one but three major engines of world growth. Until the 1980s, the United States was Latin America’s major trade partner. In the 1990s, a second growth engine emerged with the European investment boom in the region. Now, at the dawn of the new century, the emergence of Asia, and in particular China, has the potential to act as a third engine of growth. This book describes the opportunities and challenges that Latin American economies will face as Chinese importance in the world economy—and in Latin America's traditional markets—continues to grow.

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Latin America's Political Economy of the Possible: Beyond Good Revolutionaries and Free-Marketeers (MIT Press)

by Javier Santiso

Neither socialism nor free-market neoliberalism has been a very helpful model for Latin America, writes Javier Santiso in this witty and literate reading of that region's economic and political condition. Latin America must move beyond utopian schemes and rigid ideologies invented in other hemispheres and acknowledge its own social realities of inequality and poverty. And today some countries--notably Chile and Brazil, but also Mexico and Colombia--are doing just that: abandoning the economic "magic realism" that plots miraculous but impossible solutions and forging instead a pragmatic path of gradual reform. Many Latin American leaders are adopting an approach combining monetary and fiscal orthodoxies with progressive social policies. This, says Santiso, is "the silent arrival of the political economy of the possible," which offers hope to a region exhausted by economic reform programs entailing macroeconomic shocks and countershocks.

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by Javier Santiso

This book takes a cross-disciplinary look at the financial markets of emerging markets in Latin America. The author wants to disassemble the black box that is the financial market: what are the motivations and interests of the various actors, both institutional and individual? How do these interact with each other? How does this information help us understand the Mexican crisis in the 90s and the current crisis in Argentina? The author has conducted extensive interviews with brokers, asset managers, economists, strategists, and analysts in the US, UK, Europe, and Latin America, providing significant material for this study.

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