Research Library

While many countries are reluctant to accept and integrate refugees, Mexico and Brazil have established effective ways to welcome and absorb refugees through relocation programs. In her new brief, nonresident scholar Elizabeth Ferris outlines how these initiatives promote a win-win scenario by finding solutions that not only enhance refugee protection and well-being but also cater to domestic labor needs.

Supply chains: what are the alternatives if climate change restrictions on transiting the Panama Canal become a regular occurrence?

Despite the many potential challenges — including difficulties conserving water, using clean energy and dealing with the López Obrador administration — Tesla will most likely move forward with the construction of a “gigafactory" in Mexico. In this issue brief, fellow David Gantz explains why the benefits outweigh the risks.

The mix of good short-term prospects for oil revenues along with long-term market uncertainties has a clear policy implication for oil-dependent Latin American economies: use the larger short-term revenues to diversify their economies, nonresident fellow José Antonio Ocampo writes in a new issue brief.

Nonresident scholar Elizabeth Salamanca provides an overview of the main types of visas obtained by highly skilled migrants, and how each visa category could potentially change under the Trump administration.

Rice faculty scholar Leslie Schwindt-Bayer shares key findings from a recently published book she edited, “Gender and Representation in Latin America," which examines the factors that help increase women’s political presence in Latin American governments.

While academic and popular debates tend to focus on differential benefits and costs of trade across countries or industries, this brief highlights winners and losers at the level of individual firms. The authors demonstrate that preferential liberalization produces concentrated benefits among a relatively small number of very large and productive firms.

The landscape is changing for foreign direct investment in Latin America. Investments flow not only from north to south, but also from south to south and south to north. What's more, relatively small firms in developing countries are becoming as likely as multinationals to invest abroad.

This issue brief examines how globalization has aided the spread of transnational organized crime and the challenges to combating it.

An investment strategy that generates financial returns while directing funds to entities providing goods and services to the poor is making headway in Latin America.