Regional Integration in Latin America

This paper assesses the welfare effects of integration in Latin America. It estimates trade creation and diversion of: 1) integration of the four Mercosur countries (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay) and 2) amalgamation of Mercosur with the Andean group (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru). The method used to proxy trade creation is the change in total imports of a country from before to after integration, while trade diversion is proxied by the change in the country’s external imports between the two periods. A “control country” approach is used to hold constant the effects on imports of factors other than integration, such as income and price changes. With some exceptions Latin American integration was found beneficial to welfare in that trade creation exceeded trade diversion.

Clusia nubium (Clusiaceae): a new species from cloud-forests of southwestern Ecuador

Clusia nubium from southwestern Ecuador is described as a species new to science. It grows as a hemiepiphyte in lower montane cloud forest. The species belongs to Clusia sect. Retinostemon, a largely Andean group characterized by male flowers with a resin-secreting synandrium of completely fused stamens and sometimes also anthers and staminodes. It differs from all other species in that section by the combination of creamy-white petals; male flowers with a dome-shaped synandrium with numerous fused stamens surrounding a group of resin secreting staminodia; and large fruits with 9–15 peltate stigmata forming a ring.

The first species of the genus Caponina from Brazilian Amazonia (Araneae: Caponiidae)

The genus Caponina Simon, 1891 comprises eleven species of medium-sized, soil-dwelling caponiids. Most members of Caponina have six eyes, but some have five, four, three or two eyes (Brignoli 1977, Platnick 1994). The genus is widespread in South and Central America (Platnick 2012). To date, only three species have been recorded from Brazil: Caponina alegre Platnick, 1994 from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, C. notabilis (Mello-Leitão, 1939) from the states of Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, and C. tijuca Platnick, 1994 from the state of Rio de Janeiro (Platnick 1994). In this paper we describe a new species from the state of Pará, in Brazilian Amazonia. Caponina papamanga new species was collected during the “Butantan na Amazonia” project, founded by the Instituto Butantan. The phylogenetic relationships of C. papamanga could not be studied, but the greatly elongated embolus, the dorsal tubercle on the palpal femur (Figs. 7, 9) and the massive epigynal sclerotizations (Fig. 10) suggest that this species belongs to the monophyletic Andean group proposed by Platnick (1994: 7).