Paraguayan Foreign Ministry Rubén Ramírez Lescano told Congress Wednesday in Asunción that the government of President Santiago Peña was not against barges sailing through the Paraná Waterway paying toll provided there was a service in return.
According to the Monthly Industrial Survey released Wednesday by Brazil's Rio de Janeiro-based Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), industrial production in South America's largest country fell 0.3% in February, which represented its second straight monthly decline after January's -1.5%, Agencia Brasil reported.
Tech giants Google plan to link Chile with Australia and French Polynesia through the Humboldt cable, which would become first direct submarine link between South America and Oceania, thus expanding the digital infrastructure of the South Pacific.
Despite an encouraging Personal Consumption Expenditure Index, PCE, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell repeated on Sunday that the U.S. central bank isn’t in any rush to cut interest rates as policymakers await more evidence that inflation is contained.
Paraguay's Central Bank (BCP) issued a report last week announcing that the country had recorded the highest regional growth in the last quarter of 2023, with a positive rate of 4.9%.
Pablo López, the Economy Minister of the Argentine Province of Buenos Aires, a territory larger in size and productivity than many independent countries worldwide, wrote on X that the macroeconomy cannot be stabilized if production is destroyed. López, of Argentina's main opposition front, made those remarks after announcing a 4% drop in economic activity in the first two months of the year, for which he blamed President Javier Milei's policies.
French President Emmanuel Macron told a business forum in São Paulo that the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the South American Common Market (Mercosur) and the European Union (EU) needed to be ”renegotiated from scratch,” Agencia Brasil reported.
The business of selling cars in Argentina contracted 36.6% in the last 12 months as the South American country faces considerably high prices in US dollars coupled with rampant inflation and unemployment, it was reported in Buenos Aires.
Chile's National Statistics Institute (INE) released a report Thursday showing that unemployment in the mobile quarter from December 2023 to February 2024 reached 8.5%, an annual increase of 0.1%. In the Santiago Metropolitan Region (RM), it reached 9.3%, which represented a decrease of 0.4% in twelve months.
Uruguay's rural producers underlined that the constant appreciation of the local peso against the US dollar was detrimental to their exporting activities and insisted that the appropriate exchange rate should be US$ 1 = UY$ 58 instead of UY$ 37.5, which represents a 3.9% drop so far this year.