Dinámica de la especialización en América Latina: fragmentación de la producción y sofisticación de la exportaciones

The process of globalization in recent decades has led to a deep transformation of the world economy, broadening the range of economic activities that are possible to be internationally traded. Technological changes and other factors affecting trade costs provide new grounds for specialization. Allowing for further fragmentation of production processes, the last wave of globalization has spread to a diverse set of activities. This phenomenon has allowed for the emergence of the so-called Global Value Chains (GVC) bringing the participation of a large number of suppliers around the world into the production of goods and the provision of services. In particular, this phenomenon is stronger in modern manufactures that incorporate a high level of technical progress. Latin America, unlike other developing regions, has not been a leading participant in this dynamic, since its basket of exported products still shows a low level of sophistication. This paper presents a characterization of some selected countries in the region (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay) that have inserted themselves into GVC, comparing with the evidence of some developed countries (Germany, Belgium, South Korea, U.S. and Japan) and the BRIC. The results show that the region is beginning to export with comparative advantages products it did not previously export, it did sporadically or without comparative advantages. However, the performance of the Latin American countries here analyzed has been mixed in terms of the share of intermediate products into their export basket and their level of sophistication