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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.
He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.
In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.
Global Real Estate Project
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Latin America - Economic picture
There are convention between many social scientists that the countries with rule of law having GDP above certain level are much more stable, i.e. they are much more immune against internal social and economic crisis. This level is approximately put at $9,000 in purchasing power parity. So our first economic index taken from the World Bank will be the GDP ($PPP) index. According to this criterion, 4 out of sample of 19 Latin America countries are stable democracies (Argentina, Chili, Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago), and approximately the half of all the nations are near this "stability" threshold. Among this second group are the giants Mexico and Brazil. By the same token, countries with $PPP below 3,000 are real social volcanoes. You can't predict when exactly they will erupt (unfortunately together with our investments). Such dangerous zones are Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Haiti. The absolute poverty, represented by GDP index, isn't the only thing to fear when we decide where to put our money. The relative poverty or the wealth distribution is another point that has to be constantly kept in mind. It's not the same whether or not we have the same level of relative economic inequality in a very rich country such the United States or in a very poor nation such as Bolivia. With same GDP per capita, the countries with higher relative poverty will be more unstable. According to the GINI index* the countries in the region are divided on those with extremely high level of inequality (Brazil, Chili, Colombia, Paraguay, Honduras, etc.) and countries with more moderate but equally high level of inequality (Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, etc.). In this respect only Jamaica approaches the United States to the "equality" pole. Let's mention by the way that the US are among the most "unequal" societies within OECD. By far the most complex index of the presented three in this article, is the indicator of human development, that show the complex performance of many countries in different fields such as educational levels, life expectancy, $PPP, etc. The good new is that more than half of the countries included in the World Bank sample fall into the medium human development group, just behind the richest countries from OECD. The bad news is that some countries still fall far behind the regional average and it seems that they are not able to catch up with the others. To sum up, Latin America as shown in our previous articles, isn't a uniform political and economic landscape. There are at least 2-3 different Latin Americas depending on the human development, the GDP per capita and the wealth distribution. There is something for everyone, countries closer to the richest and other far away from the modern standards. The first group offers stability, well-educated population and higher standards; the second can only hope to offer the same qualities in a distant future.
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Latin America: --------------------
See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of South America and Central America.
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