The Cold War heightened the perception of threat in the United States and among Latin American elites, from the Soviet Union but also other socialist states. When the Cold War ended, Latin America began expanding and deepening its economic and political connections with more parts of the world than it ever had before. Economic restructuring after the debt crisis had already oriented Latin American economies to export globally, and the number and variety of trading partners multiplied. The Cold War had been a “bipolar” international environment, where two large powers (the United States and the Soviet Union) were locked in ideological conflict, which in turn pulled in other countries, voluntarily or not. As seen in previous chapters, the U.S. judged Latin American governments by their response to that ideological struggle. The end of the Cold War meant a return to a “multipolar” environment with no major single conflict, which opened up the world to Latin American governments. This chapter explores contemporary relations between Latin America and China, Russia, Japan, Europe, and Iran.

Crises typically originate in financial overshoot as mounting debt becomes unsustainable. Despite centuries of catastrophic experience with this phenomenon, policymakers have not figured out how to consistently avoid it. A strong human tendency to rationalize excess seems to impede recognition of a problem until it’s too late, in a "this time is different" mentality. Crisis situations put monetary and fiscal policy to their ultimate test. The Asian Financial crisis rolled across the region in 1997. As the epicenter, Thailand offers a window into the incubation and eruption of a financial crisis and lessons learned about policy response. From 2020, a crisis of a different sort has unfolded in the form of a shock to the real economy from a pandemic. The policy response to this crisis has differed greatly among Emerging East Asian economies with constraints on policy bearing on options.

According to Nobel Prize laureate Douglass North (1990, p. 3): “Institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.” The definition emphasizes that the “rules of the game” are devised by humans (so we can control them), that they impose constraints on our behavior, and that they provide incentives for human interaction. It is immediately clear that this definition of institutions is broad, can be applied to many different types of rules, regulations, or customs, and includes contracts, and through their impact on economic incentives must be important for economic development (see sections 8.4–8.8). It should also be clear that the wide applicability of institutions as the rules of the game does not allow us to study it in depth in one brief chapter. Codified law, for example, is certainly only a small part of institutions and it takes law students many years of detailed study to know and better understand this small part. Evidently, this chapter only touches the surface here.

This chapter describes how the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere protect the surface from both electromagnetic and charged particle or corpuscular radiation and describes ionizing radiation. The health impacts of space travel due to microgravity, vacuum of space, ionizing radiation, meteoroid impacts, and isolation are described. Some of the issues with traveling in space and living on the Moon and Mars are discussed. The possibility of interstellar travel and the existence of other technological space-faring civilizations are described in the context of the vast distances between the stars and the use of the Drake equation.

This chapter describes a range of space weather impacts and introduces anthropogenic (human-induced) space weather through nuclear weapons. The role that space weather and solar variability has on climate is introduced, highlighting the uncertainties and difficulties of making direct connections. Discussion of the probability and effects of asteroid impacts on the global climate system is discussed to compare with the impacts of a global or regional nuclear war. The impacts of nearby supernovas and observations of gamma ray bursts are described with respect to their impacts on the upper atmosphere of the Earth. Supplements provide a discussion of correlation and causation.

With the rise of Hugo Chávez and other presidents around the turn of the century, a new breed of leftist leaders challenged the postwar political and economic rules promoted by the United States. Many Latin American left-leaning governments openly used the language of dependency theory to depict their strategy. Joining together within both economic and political institutions that excluded the United States, they hoped that they could break the stranglehold of international capitalism and imperial designs. Strategies along these lines include trade agreements, the creation of international institutions, discussions of common currencies, and mutual aid. The ultimate goal of these various efforts is to establish political and economic autonomy from the United States. That would mean being freed from political interference, economic pressure, violations of sovereignty, or any other type of imposition from the hegemonic power. This chapter takes stock of the Latin American left’s ability to chart a course distinct from that preferred by the United States in the twenty-first century.

It is almost excessive to start a chapter with three quotes, but their combination adequately reflects the essence of scientific understanding and continuous improvement. All three quotes are well known, although Lord Kelvin’s is too long to be remembered verbatim. The process of scientific improvement is shown as a virtuous circle in Figure 2.1, explained briefly below.

Macroeconomics is the study of movement in aggregate economic activity. The focus of this text is, in particular, on short-run fluctuations around long-run potential growth. Deviations from potential result in output gaps, either positive, involving overheating, or negative, involving underperformance. For the open economies of Emerging East Asia, shocks to foreign trade and capital flows are a major source of volatility. Stabilization policy aims to keep an economy growing on track with its potential.

This text begins by laying foundations in balance of payments and exchange rates, and in money and finance, tailored to the Emerging East Asia setting. It then presents theories of macroeconomic instability and the business cycle. Discussion of monetary and fiscal policy follows with attention to the coordinated pursuit of internal and external balance. As fitting the Emerging East Asia context, emphasis is on the role of the exchange rate and the constraints imposed on policy by global capital markets and debt sustainability strictures.

The protection and promotion of human rights and democracy in Latin America, a region historically beset by civil strife, military actions, and foreign intervention, is a difficult task. Before World War II, human rights and democracy promotion were not factors in U.S.–Latin American relations (or, in fact, international relations in general). When the United States or regional governments invoked concerns about human rights or democracy during the Cold War, they did so based on narrow security interests rather than any serious commitment to human rights or democracy. However, there has been a renewed commitment to human rights and democracy in the twenty-first century. This chapter addresses human rights and democracy promotion in the context of the construction of norms and agreements by U.S. and Latin American governments.

Following the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War heated up in Latin America. To some, the Revolution was a sign of the spread of Soviet-directed Communist movements and the pressing need to stop this by any means possible. To others, Castro’s success was a symbol of hope: the United States was not all-powerful, and so radical reform was within the realm of possibility. The United States sought to undermine the Cuban Revolution and to prevent similar developments from happening elsewhere. It supported a number of initiatives to prevent the spread of Communism in the hemisphere, including the Alliance for Progress, strengthening ties with the region’s militaries, and overt and covert programs to support “friendly” governments and destabilize “unfriendly” ones. The resulting clashes led to one of the darkest periods of U.S.–Latin American relations.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a fledgling power, weaker than many European countries in both economic and military terms. The central government had effective control over only a small area of the continent, and disputes between it and the states were already well entrenched. The country had continental aspirations, but only gradually would it begin moving its border westward. The power imbalance between the United States and Latin America was therefore not yet great, but it would rapidly swing in favour of the U.S. in the first decades of the century. This chapter analyzes the challenges in establishing and maintaining relations between governments in the United States and Latin America and concludes with the post–Civil War period, at which time U.S. economic and military power markedly increased.

The dominant paradigm for analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations takes full-employment equilibrium as the norm and attributes temporary and self-correcting deviations from this norm to exogenous shocks. Notions of the natural rate of unemployment and rational expectations for inflation rest on an equilibrium premise, as do contemporary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. There is, however, another way of thinking about business cycles to be found in the historical literature. This alternative paradigm takes the movement of an economy through business cycles as itself the norm and views endogenous forces as driving the process. At the heart of the dynamic is credit behavior in a story that goes back to Bagehot (1874) and found renewal with Minsky (1986). In the boom phase of the cycle, credit expands, business is good, risk is rewarded, and asset values are bid up. But the process overshoots, and collapse ensues, to be followed by a cleansing of excess as businesses fail and the financial system retrenches. Bagehot himself proposed a synthesis of the two paradigms, and this approach works well to interpret the ups and downs of the Philippine economy historically.