Spatial fixes and switching crises in the times of COVID-19: implications for commodity-producing economies in Latin America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the vulnerabilities of Latin America’s commodity-producing countries and is exacerbating their structurally weak position in global financial capitalism. Due to a high dependency on incomes from commodity exports, a reliance on external finance, and the volatility of exchange rates, the economies of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru are hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 crisis with projections for 2020 predicting economic contractions of up to 14 per cent. By looking through the theoretical prism of critical economic geography, this article argues that in addition to the health and direct economic consequences of the pandemic, these countries will experience so-called switching crises as a result of the constant geographical restructuring of capitalism. As capital had moved into Latin America’s commodity-producing economies to provide spatial fixes to global capitalism’s previous crises by displacing them geographically and temporarily, the fall in commodity prices and the sudden stop to and reversal of capital flows has caused additional burdens in the current crisis. With the resulting debt expansion, the remaining dependency on external finance, and the structural deficiencies in achieving economic diversification, the territorialisation of capitalism’s crisis tendencies in the COVID-19 crisis will disproportionately affect Latin America’s commodity-producing economies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".