In the wake of the collapse of Terra — a once-prosperous blockchain network that suffered one of the biggest falls in the history of cryptocurrency — the authors discuss recent government efforts to regulate digital assets.
Alexander Hernández Romanowski, Helen BrantleyJuly 22, 2022
This brief explores how the emerging use of blockchain technology in financial services could transform small business lending and improve capital access for businesses excluded by conventional lending processes.
This brief examines the legality of the decrees issued by the National Center for the Control of Energy (CENACE) and the Department of Energy (SENER) in Mexico earlier this year, which were intended to prevent renewable energy companies from connecting to the transmission grid.
This paper tracks a change in the direction of Mexico’s energy policy under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — a change that inhibits private investment while attempting to restore Pemex’s oil monopoly.
Mexico’s 2013 energy reform, which opened its hydrocarbon and electricity industries to private investors, increased the autonomy and independence of its regulatory commissions. However, recent decisions by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador now threaten these institutions, writes nonresident scholar Miriam Grunstein.
By Imad Salamey, Ph.D., Lebanese American University
Contemporary Arab politics have been overwhelmed by communitarian divisions. This research reviews rising transnational communitarianism in the Middle East and suggests communitarian plurality as a solution to ongoing political conflicts in the region.
Imad Salamey discusses in both a short issue brief and longer research paper on pluralism and inclusion in the Middle East after the Arab Spring. The project is generously supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
To gain public support for Mexico’s energy reforms, the government promised a future of low gas prices. The author documents the fallout when gas prices instead shot up 20 percent.
Since early 2014, Brazil has been in the midst of a political and economic crisis characterized by the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff, steadily worsening economic conditions, and an investigation into widespread corruption within the government and Petrobras, the state-owned oil company. Experts from the Latin America Initiative analyze different aspects of the current situation in the issue briefs listed below.
Since the first quarter of 2014, Brazil has been living in crisis mode as the result of a severe economic crisis in conjunction with an investigation into widespread corruption that has penetrated the highest offices in the government. Although the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 did offer some hope for recovery, recent events demonstrate that Brazil's troubles are still ongoing. Contributing expert Sergio Fausto analyzes the main factors leading to this crisis and surveys the current economic and political situation.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is starting her second term in office facing economic and political problems that feed into each other. These problems can be attributed to a large extent to mistakes her administration made during her first term. Rousseff’s macroeconomic policy proved to be inconsistent, and the choices she made in some key economic sectors, especially energy, were demonstrably disastrous. Rousseff now faces
the enormous challenge of reconciling the leftwing populism that led her to victory with the inescapable need
to regain the trust of the most dynamic sectors of Brazilian society, including the private sector.