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Otaviano Canuto draws on extensive experience working in multilateral institutions, government, and academia across a wide range of markets and countries to assist clients navigate challenges and opportunities.
Latest articles
Greening in the Wrong Places: Geography, Policy Distortions, and the Hidden Costs of Misallocated Green Investment
Decarbonization is reconfiguring global relative prices. As clean energy, natural capital, and location-specific assets become dominant industrial inputs, the relative cost of producing low-carbon goods is increasingly determined by geography. Two systematic distortions explain why the expected reallocation of investment toward renewable-rich economies remains incomplete. First, industrial policy interventions, including subsidies, trade barriers, and certification systems, disconnect effective prices from underlying structural costs. Second, institutional failures create demand uncertainty that leaves structurally competitive projects unbankable. Together, these distortions generate static misallocation, leading to slower technological learning, higher fiscal burdens, delayed emissions reductions, and suppressed industrial opportunities in developing economies. This paper is part of broader research on powershoring and green comparative advantage, which focuses on the idea that decarbonization is a spatial and price reorganization of global production, in addition to a technological transition.
The Productive Value of Care: Evidence from International Experience and Implications for Morocco
Closing Morocco’s gender employment gap could increase GDP per capita by 40-50 percent; yet female labor force participation stands at just 19 percent—among the lowest in the world and still declining. This policy paper argues that investing in the care economy is not merely a social expenditure, but a productive economic strategy with measurable returns. Drawing on international evidence from Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, and India, the brief demonstrates that well-designed care systems—spanning childcare, eldercare, and domestic work—can substantially increase women’s labor force participation, generate employment across sectors, improve human capital outcomes, and expand the fiscal base through workforce formalization.
The paper identifies four operational pillars for reform: building a robust measurement infrastructure, including a satellite account for unpaid care work; expanding affordable, high-quality childcare, particularly for children under three; professionalizing and formalizing the care workforce; and strengthening governance through a centralized coordination body. Morocco’s ongoing reform agenda—anchored in the New Development Model and the Jobs Roadmap—offers a timely opportunity to embed these investments within national policy.
U.S., China, and Latin America: How Far Does the Donroe Doctrine Go?
The commercial and geopolitical interdependence between China and Latin America makes any U.S. claim to promote a “decoupling” between them impractical. Digital technologies and critical minerals will be in the crosshairs of the North American National Security Strategy
EUA, China e América Latina: até onde vai a Doutrina Donroe?
A interdependência comercial e geopolítica entre a China e a América Latina torna impraticável qualquer pretensão dos EUA de promover um “desacoplamento” entre elas. As tecnologias digitais e os minerais críticos estarão na mira da Estratégia de Segurança Nacional norte-americana
Dire Strait of Hormuz: A Chokepoint for Global Food and Energy
The outbreak of conflict in the Middle East has triggered a multi-layered shock to the global economy and financial markets. The severity of global consequences will depend on the duration of disruptions—particularly to the Strait of Hormuz—and the policy responses of governments and central banks.
We approach here the transmission channels through which conflict has affected global energy markets, commodity supply and prices, transportation systems, macroeconomic conditions, and financial markets. Rather than focusing only on oil and gas supply, we trace how the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz and related infrastructure has potentially propagated through shipping, aviation, food costs, remittances, inflation expectations, and central-bank responses. Although short-term disruptions may produce volatility without structural transformation, prolonged conflict risks leading to stagflation, change of trade patterns, and reshaping global financial dynamics.
Transmission Channels of the War on Iran to the Brazilian Economy
Diesel and fertilizers are the most concerning transmission channels of the Middle East conflict for Brazil
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