ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changing dynamics of Latin America’s positioning within the global economy, by first grasping the global and regional forces that are shaping the contemporary juncture for Latin America, and then, necessarily tentatively, tracing the dominant trends that are emerging in response to these processes of change. Growth and development across the world are conditioned by the shape and evolution of the global economy. Since the early to mid-2000s, however, the power structures associated with neoliberal globalization have visibly been undermined in the global and the regional economies, reshaping the environment of Latin American development. The inability of the United States (US) government to achieve its stated preferences in these negotiations, despite vast asymmetries of economic and political power, thus offers an insight into how, by the mid-2000s, both the economic foundations and political dynamics of the region were shifting away from a pattern shaped by US dominance and the neoliberal consensus that had crystallized in preceding decades.
