This paper presents a comparative analysis of the influences of sociology, economics, and political science over Latin American studies. It applies a natural language processing technique called “latent semantic analysis” to measure such influences and provides a unique systematic evidence of the relationship among academic disciplines. Latent semantic analysis uncovers shifting influences of the three disciplines over Latin American studies during the period between 1990 and 2012. This paper argues that the rise and fall of the influence of political science and economics can be explained by salient political and economic issues which Latin American countries had encountered at each historical juncture. It also claims that the unique patterns of sociological influence over Latin American studies reflect the distinctive characteristics of sociology as a discipline. Latent semantic analysis will open up a new field of research for the social scientists and area specialists.

Sanitary and phytosanitary measures remain as important barriers for the international trade of fresh agricultural products. In order to increase the export of fresh products, exporting countries must overcome the restrictions imposed by importing countries. In Latin America, Peru is one of the countries that have increased its export of fresh produce in recent years. The export of fresh asparagus has been expanding since the beginning of the 2000, followed by other products, such as grapes, avocados, mangoes, and mandarin oranges. This paper analyses how Peru has overcome phytosanitary barriers in order to expand its exports. The results of this study show that the national plant protection organization has been able to strengthen its activities, due to the standardization of phytosanitary protocols at the international level, the fortification of producer organizations, and the resource mobilization of these organizations.

More than 15 years have passed since Mexico’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) Program was introduced as a new targeted poverty reduction strategy. CCTs have two main objectives to alleviate ‘present poverty’ through cash transfers, and to reduce ‘future poverty’ by promoting investment in human capital. This paper will emphasize the former aspect by discussing the effects of the CCT program on the consumption of the rural poor in Mexico. In this respect, the causality between poverty degradation and the food price increases between 2003 and 2007 will be examined using household panel data. The empirical results show that poverty, measured by food consumption, worsened significantly. Moreover, the cash transfer of CCT served as a partial buffer, but could not protect the poorest of the poor completely from price shocks.

The present research focuses on the study of the impact that the so-called cultural distance has on international trade of cultural goods. This concept of cultural distance is relatively new and has been gaining a lot of attention by international business scholars in the recent years. Though most of the existent literature has focused on analyzing this concept taking as case studies, volumes of exports of non-cultural products, there is still very little to inexistent research done on the effect of cultural distance in the trade of cultural goods. Empirical researchers are observed to be conducting research about cultural products, from a more social and anthropological point of view. Therefore, in the present paper, an attempt is made to determine the degree of impact that cultural distance has, in the trade of cultural products, by introducing as a research case study the expansion of ‘telenovelas’ (Latin American soap operas) in the different global markets.