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The Latin American merger and acquisition (M&A) market offers enormous opportunities. M&A activity in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela is examined and compared with M&A activity in the United States. Characteristics examined include the industries and form of ownership of the target firms, the types of transactions, and the home countries of the acquiring firms. Differences are found between characteristics of M&A activity in the Latin American countries and the United States. Differences are also found among the characteristics of M&A activity in the various Latin American countries. Implications for managers and areas in need of additional research are discussed.

The article aims at exploring the challenges and possibilities of cooperation of higher education in a Latin American social, political and cultural context that faces historical difficulties of integration, as well as the potential contribution of academic cooperation for global citizenship.

The paper presents a general overview of networks and international centers of academic cooperation of higher education in Latin America. The analysis comprises objectives, countries, stakeholders, activities, projects and scope. The study is based on literature on internationalization, regional integration and the development of higher education, as well as on empirical gathered with networks/centers and key actors in the field. This study was carried out as a mixed qualitative method design. Firstly, a systematic review of a literature corpus of studies produced by Latin-American scholars was performed. Semi-structured interviews were then carried out with a group of scholars who are members of networks.

The findings include a review of the role of higher education in a politically fragmented reality, a panorama of major networks and international centers of academic cooperation with emphasis on internationalization of higher education, as well as their connections. The are highlighted examples of successful initiatives of cooperation and, based on interviews, there is presented a preliminary view on cooperation and trust building from professionals in higher education in Latin America.

In the last decades, with the growing interest and need for internationalizing higher education, many universities have organized or joined networks and international centers. The article will contribute for mutual knowledge of these spaces, their shortcomings and potentials, thus creating conditions for dialogue among them, as well as with universities in other continents.

The Latin American region experienced an electoral shift to the political left during the 2000s but this leftist shift did not radically alter the political economy of the region. Following Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach to theorizing about the state, this paper focuses on the perspective that the structure of the state is both an outcome of prior social struggles and a structuring mechanism for the social actors that attempt to enact political and economic reforms.

After demonstrating what this has historically meant for the types of state that have existed in Latin America during the past century by reviewing some of the literature on the corporatist and bureaucratic-authoritarian states and clientelism, this paper argues that the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s constituted a new type of state – the Latin American neoliberal state. This analysis is then focused on the literature that seeks to describe the new lefts in the region, while continuing to focus on the role of the neoliberal state in structuring these new lefts’ terrain of struggle.

Understanding the new lefts in Latin America and the types of reforms that they are capable of making requires that we better understand this new type of state. Due to the structural limitations imposed by the neoliberal state, the lefts are not able to radically alter the region’s political economy.

This paper explores the relationship between foreign direct investments and financial reporting changes via financial development in 12 Latin American countries during the period from 1997 to 2010.

In order to control the possible endogeneity problem, the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation technique has been conducted using country-level panel data obtained from the World Development Indicators website.

The empirical analyses provide evidence that international accounting standards have a significant effect on foreign direct investments. However, financial development associated with such standards reduces this positive effect. This is an important finding, suggesting that investors are likely to prefer portfolio to direct investments in Latin American financial markets that require or permit the use of international accounting standards.

The conclusions that have been drawn from this study are important for investors, creditors, and regulators. Although international accounting standards appear to affect foreign investments, there could be a lack of adaptation of these standards to specific economic environments due to cultural, educational, and economic factors. Therefore, firms, regulators, professional organizations, and accounting firms should make necessary arrangements so that the benefits of using these standards increase their costs.

The study contributes to the international accounting literature by examining the effects of international accounting standards and financial development on foreign direct investments in Latin America.

This chapter offers a brief comparative and socio-educative overview of Latin America and the Caribbean, elaborated with the purpose of guiding reflection on the diversity of contexts that constitute the region. This overview highlights economic, social, political and cultural aspects that characterize the region and that, consequently, indicate points of departure and arrival for the design and implementation of educational policies aimed at satisfying the socio-historical needs of each of the Latin American countries.

This abbreviated study includes a systematic review and contrast of basic aspects of regional education systems, focused on achieving the formation of an integral citizen, capable of applying the acquired competencies in the resolution of problems that will prepare them for insertion in the labor market once their schooling is completed. In this sense, the countries and dependencies that integrate the Latin American and Caribbean region still face complex challenges closely related to the quality that educational services have achieved, in addition to the conditions of equality and equity so necessary to integrate the broad sectors of the population located on the thresholds of poverty and marginalization, of the secular horizon that has characterized the Latin American socioeconomic reality.

Throughout centuries, Latin America has faced a paradox. On one hand, the abundance of resources has attracted immigrants who find a suitable place to undertake profitable business ventures in the region. On the other hand, the limited entrepreneurial resources of most countries of the region have motivated the migration of talented people, among them entrepreneurs, to non-Latin American countries. This chapter explores this paradox through the analysis of entrepreneurs' motivations to immigrate to, and migrate from Latin America, the influence of their profile on their business ventures, as well as the role played by both the home and the host countries' institutional conditions. The findings of this analysis underline the diversity of migrant entrepreneurs in terms of personal resources and survival versus opportunity-driven migration decisions. They also reveal the kind of mechanisms migrant entrepreneurs use to counteract their host country's institutional challenges.

This chapter intends to make an extended periodization of economic discussions that have taken place in Latin America throughout its history. The task is ambitious; we begin, however, with the periodization elaborated by Oreste Popescu, which we then expand and modify. As educators, we still have to work on the training of Latin American economists, due to the lack of knowledge they have not only about the region as a whole, but also of the economic debates that took place within it. This work is a first approximation and provocation aimed to jumpstart a discussion on these issues.

Throughout Latin America, policy-makers are struggling to reconcile two conflicting political pressures: (i) the push to become more globally competitive on the basis of international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and (ii) the simultaneous need to address long-standing, entrenched inequities in both educational quality and access throughout much of the region. This chapter documents how policy-making elites throughout Latin America are trying to address these two goals by incorporating “evidence-based” policy solutions that can be empirically defended as promoting equity. However, scholars throughout Latin America argue that instead of promoting equity, an increasing focus on accountability in educational policy at the national level throughout the region has resulted instead in a shift in priorities from the governance of educational systems to evaluation of those systems, with the state functioning primarily as an Evaluative State. This argument is developed through secondary analysis of the Hispanophone and Lusophone academic education literatures of Latin America, whose robust and rigorous studies of these trends at both national and regional levels remain little explored within the Anglophone academic tradition.

The relations between the Latin American states and their armed forces have been a special one at all times. In this region the military played and still plays a major political role. But the political role of the military has changed several times during the last century. These changes were forced by social movements, new patterns of thought, the USA or the Cuban Revolution. During the years, the military had different self-perceptions, which caused in a lot of interventions and military dictatorships. Today, it seems that democracy is well accepted throughout Latin America, but the military still has possibilities of influence.