Economic Development of the Latin American Integration Association: Trends and Prospects

Relevance. Catch-up countries are at a disadvantage in the world economy and are forced to fight for world market share. For thispurpose, they form political and economic alliances and associationsdesigned to counter the aggressive policies of the developed countries.All this applies fully to countries that are members of the LatinAmericanIntegrationAssociation(LAIA).In our opinion, the assessment of the position of the participating countries on the geopolitical map of the world deserves special attention.Purposeofthestudyconsistsin the formation of an author’smethodology for studying the economic development of countriesthat are members of the Latin American Integration Association andbuildinga forecast in the medium term on the basis of statistical tools.Materials and methods. The study used general research methods,suchasanalysis, comparisons, historical,aswell asmathematicalandstatistical, in particular tabular and graphical, descriptive statistics ande l ement so fcorr e l at io n- r e gr e ssio nana l y sis .A set of these methodsand algorithms made it possible to identify the patterns that havedeveloped at the moment in the economies of the Latin AmericanIntegrationAssociationcountries,assesstheirpositionsregardingworldleaders, and also build short-term development forecasts.Results. With considerable resources, the countries of the LatinAmerican Integration Association have not been able to significantlyincrease theshare ofworld GDPduringthe existenceoftheassociation,which throughout the period does not exceed 5%.Within the association, there is a considerable differentiation. So thedominant positions are occupied by Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, whilethe positions of outsiders, by a significant margin, are occupied by Uruguay, Ecuador and Cuba. The structure of the economies of the association countries is largely different from the developed countries:the former are dominated by manufacturing, while the latter are dominated by services. A causal analysis of the impact of industrieson GDP per capita, conducted in two time slices in 1990 and2019, showed that during this time the countries that are membersof the association have not been able to reformat the structure oftheir economies, which does not allow successful competition withdeveloped countries. An element of the scientific novelty of the study is the formation of a theoretical and methodological approach tothe study of the economic development of the geopolitical structure,which is the Latin American Integration Association, as well as the testing of this approach based on the actual data of international organizations.Conclusion.Thetestingoftheauthor’smethodologyaimedatstudyingthe economic development of LAIA member countries allows us toargueabouttheoperabilityofthealgorithm,whichmadeitpossibletoestablishthelowefficiencyoftheintegrationpolicyofLatinAmerican countries, which, despite the significant level of national wealth, doesnot allow us to form a trend towards economic growth, a decreasein dependence on the export of natural capital, and an increase inthe standard of living of the population. Someresearchfindingsfromthestudycanbeusedintrainingactivitiesfor the disciplines of “Macroeconomics”, “International Statistics”,“Geoeconomics”, “Econometrics”, as well as in the analysis of the joint dynamics of political and economic communities, associationsand groups. In subsequent publications, an in-depth analysis ofthe causes of the economic decline in each member country of the association will be carried out, dominant factors affecting growth andGDP decline will be identified.