Energy Planning in Latin America: A Brief Review of Selected Countries

Abstract

Present conditions in the international energy market and the problems they pose for Latin America hardly need emphasis, especially the uncertainty with respect to the availability and price of specific forms like oil. These concerns are, of course, aggravated by the need to respond to the short-term severe dislocations in the energy market, while at the same time taking coherent steps toward long-term solutions of national energy problems. Indeed, how should oil importing countries offset price increases, which exacerbate national deficits and debt service; deal with inflation, which raises the cost of developing indigenous resources; and successfully increase exports, when a number of other countries around the world are pursuing similar export expansion policies? While in broad terms the international energy market imposes a set of constraints upon all Latin America, there is a wide variety of responses among the countries themselves. The oil importing countries (Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Brazil) face a set of problems different from that of more-orless self sufficient nations (Argentina, Colombia), which is in turn quite different from the major oil exporter (Venezuela). The needs of each country are, therefore, a combination of the international context and the specific situation within a country, and this is reflected in the nature of their energy planning and policy institutions. Since there are common elements of government structure between one country and another, we selected a group of prototypical countries as examples of the way in which Latin American nations organize their energy planning and policy activity. From current energy analyses in these countries and their institutional arrangements we generalize to define some directions toward improving energy analysis capability in Latin American nations.