Brazil and South Korea: Two Tales Of a Middle-Income Trap

June 9, 2021

The middle-income trap may well characterize the experience of Brazil and most of Latin America since the 1980s. Conversely, South Korea maintained its pace of evolution, reaching a high-income status. Such divergence of economic growth can be related to their distinctive performances of domestic accumulation of technological and organizational capabilities. Their different approaches to global value chains and trade globalization reinforced such discrepancy in domestic accumulation processes.

Speakers
Otaviano Canuto
Senior Fellow
Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South, principal at Center for Macroeconomics and Development and non-resident fellow at Brookings Institute. Former Vice President and Executive Director at the World Bank, Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Vice President at the Inter-American Development Bank. He was also Deputy Minister for international affairs at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, as well as professor of economics at University of São Paulo (USP) and University of Campinas (UNICAMP). ...

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