Geopolitical Lens

Capital, standards and supply chains are being re-routed around LATAM with no shared regional read on it. Stand up a working group to map technology flows and broker corridors with superpowers and middle powers.

The rationale

The region transacts with the new technology order one bilateral agreement at a time, with no shared picture of what is being traded. China moved deep tech from 15% to 71% of its domestic tech investment between 2017 and 2022, raised its project count in LATAM by 33% between 2018 and 2023 even as total value fell, and put 60% of its 2022 regional investment into frontier sectors. The UAE has signed comprehensive economic partnership agreements with six LATAM countries since 2024. Trade ministries are negotiating each of these without a common baseline of what the others have already conceded.

A working group with a publication schedule turns scattered agreements into a position. Its first product is a reconciliation, not a heatmap: ECLAC’s balance-of-payments FDI shares for 2023, the United States at 33%, the EU at 22% and China at 0.4%, set against announced-investment trackers that put China near 10%, with a written explanation of why the two measure different things. On that base, quarterly flow maps plus model annexes for the four corridor types the region already signs, special economic zones, joint labs, procurement pilots and standards MOUs, give a negotiator a template instead of a blank page.

This rec should not promise de-risking, and the report does not. Its own conclusion on who captures the value from these corridors is that it remains to be seen; what a portfolio of partners buys is risk spread across counterparties rather than concentrated in one, which is a weaker and defensible claim. The sovereignty objection cuts both ways: a regional body publishing what each country has signed constrains national negotiating room, and some capitals will read the map as a scoreboard. Containment is scope. The group maps and drafts templates. It does not approve, price or veto deals.

The evidence

First moves

1. 0–6 months

   Publish the FDI reconciliation

   Put ECLAC’s balance-of-payments FDI shares and the announced-investment trackers into one table for 2023 to 2025, with a written explanation of why China reads at 0.4% in one series and near 10% in the other. Deliverable: one published reconciliation note carrying both series and the methodological difference in plain language.

   LADP coalition secretariat with ECLAC and a regional think-tank consortium
2. 6–18 months

   Ship four corridor annexes

   Draft model terms for the four corridor types the region already signs, with technology-transfer, data-residency and local-content clauses lifted from live agreements such as the January 2025 Brazil to UAE strategic-minerals MoU and the Embrapii and Canadian National Research Council co-funded program running under the Canadian International Innovation Program since April 2021. Deliverable: four model annexes a trade ministry can attach to an open negotiation.

   Mercosur and Pacific Alliance secretariats with national trade ministries
3. 18–36 months

   Quarterly flow map on a fixed calendar

   Publish a quarterly map of technology-relevant capital, procurement and standards commitments by counterparty country, with every entry carrying its source and a flag for announced versus disbursed. Deliverable: four consecutive editions on a stable schema, so the second year is comparable to the first.

   IDB with the LADP coalition secretariat

How we would know it worked

• Share of new LATAM technology and investment agreements in the quarter that use a coalition model annex, counted in the flow map, rising above half of signings
• Concentration of technology-relevant commitments by counterparty country, published quarterly as a share of the regional total, with the largest single partner falling below 40%
• Gap between announced and disbursed commitments per counterparty, reported in every edition, narrowing as announcements convert
• Number of countries publishing their technology-agreement register on the shared schema, rising from zero toward full coalition membership

What could go wrong

Who acts

Rests on

The data behind it