Complication

Writing about an OECD report on Latin America in the crisis, Andrés Oppenheimer wonders if the region's economic recovery will be harder because it will coincide with a rather busy election season. From 2010 to 2012, eleven Latin American nations will elect new leaders, which usually leads to unstable climates in which investors look elsewhere.

That sounds logical and is probably true, but 2010 to 2012 is three calendar years. Given that most presidents serve between four and six years, the fact that eleven out of twenty-plus nations have elections in that span is not all that usual. If anything, it's a smaller number than you'd expect. When I get a chance (it's lunchtime now, so it'll have to be later), I'd be interested to check out how many of the democratic nations in the G-20 will have elections over the same period. I'm willing to bet that the figure exceeds half, which is to say, it's comparable or more than the number in Latin America. This isn't so much a Latin American problem, but a universal problem most democracies are going to have to overcome, although Latin America's tradition of public spending binges ahead of elections makes it more problematic there.