🚧 Mercosur: 35 and unfinished

In 1998, then-Argentine President Carlos Menem took the stage at the World Economic Forum and made a bold promise: Mercosur would accomplish in five years what the European Union had taken five decades to build, including a common currency. Brazilian officials in the audience winced, and they were right to. 

Twenty-eight years later, Mercosur marks its 35th birthday today without a common currency, or a fully functional customs union or, until very recently, a single trade deal with a major economy. What it does have (finally) is a landmark agreement with the EU that enters provisional implementation on May 1, jolting some life into a bloc that badly needed it…

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