Together or piled up. A new approach to mercosur’slifetime

Abstract

For some time now, the difficulties in consolidating the MERCOSUR are no longer new. Today, economic and political instabilities appear to be the only sustainable and common facet in Latin American countries. Therefore, it is interesting to discuss with some evidence whether MERCOSUR is an institution that evolves consistently with its objectives despite the circumstances, or whether MERCOSUR is just a set of countries that like leaves pile up according to wind and luck. We addressed the periodization of MERCOSUR’s lifetime based on a new approach. The main contribution of this paper is a precise delimitation of the stages in the evolution of the MERCOSUR from a method that reduces the risk of diverse types of biases. In fact, we showed evidence in favor of the first characterization, but the second prevails.