South America and the neighbours to the west Sign in with LinkedIn
2h | Natalie Bannerman From fibre and satellites to towers and subsea, Capacity’s Natalie Bannerman dives into the markets along South America’s west coast, to see how its digital transformation is progressing.
With a total population of more than 430 million, the continent of South America is as varied and diverse as it comes. But the conversation as it relates to its telecoms journey, especially its telecoms infrastructure development, is largely monopolised by the likes of Brazil and Argentina along the east coast.
While there are obvious reasons for this, primarily the size of these countries and their direct paths to Europe and the US, less is spoken about their west coast counterparts such as Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, at least in the mainstream.
Chile’s housing market cooling rapidly
House prices up by 1.7% during 2020
Chile’s housing market is slowing rapidly, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The average price of new apartments in Greater Santiago rose by 1.7% during 2020, sharply down from the previous year’s 7.32% growth. Yet on a quarterly basis, house prices increased 3.98% in Q4 2020.
Demand and supply are falling sharply. During 2020, new home sales in Greater Santiago area plummeted by 28.2% y-o-y to 22,672 units, following a 6.9% decline in 2019, according to the Chilean Chamber of Construction (CChC). Likewise in 2020, the total number and area of residential buildings authorized fell by 25.7% and 28.5% y-o-y, respectively.
The delay will undoubtedly cost countless lives and risk future, potentially dangerous mutations of the Covid-19 virus. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, initial tests showed, is far less effective against the Covid-19 variant that has spread rapidly through South Africa, for example. A prolonged pandemic will also threaten to extend and exacerbate a global economic downturn.
In response, governments around the world are considering a temporary exemption to traditional intellectual property rights in order to rapidly produce coronavirus treatments at low cost, a demand intensely opposed by American lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry.
The push by foreign governments to unilaterally set the price and pace of production of coronavirus vaccines, drug lobbyists with the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, or BIO, argued, will place “American jobs and the workers who rely on them at risk, and impede scientific advances from reaching society.”
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - Chile’s housing market is slowing rapidly, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The average price of new apartments in Greater Santiago rose by 1.7% during 2020, sharply down from the previous year’s 7.32% growth. Yet on a quarterly basis, house prices increased 3.98% in Q4 2020.
Demand and supply are falling sharply. During 2020, new home sales in Greater Santiago area plummeted by 28.2% y-o-y to 22,672 units, following a 6.9% decline in 2019, according to the Chilean Chamber of Construction (CChC). Likewise in 2020, the total . . .
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by
Aisshwarya Tiwari
on
January 18, 2021 Regulation
Ecuadorian presidential candidate wants the country to join in the CBDC bandwagon.
Making Ecuador Crypto-Friendly
According to a recent report by
Decrypt, Ecuadorian presidential candidate for 2021 and the current president of the Ecuadorian-Chilean Chamber of Mining, Geovanni Andrade, recently stated that he has plans to develop a national cryptocurrency to enable transactions within Ecuador.
The presidential hopeful, in a recent interview with the digital newspaper
Primicias shed light on his government plan, stating that a national cryptocurrency would make internal transactions easier and facilitate their audit.
In addition, Andrade said the national cryptocurrency project is an essential part of his vision for Ecuador.