The world has changed radically in the last four decades. It has not only become digitized and connected thanks to the Internet, a concept that did not exist in the early 1980s, except for a small number of experts and academics. It has also grown a lot. According to the World Economic Forumbased on World Bank data, the world's population has doubled in the last forty years, while GDP has quadrupled.

But this growth was not even. Southeast Asia takes the cake in terms of economic growth, with an average GDP expansion of 5.6% per year during this period.. Latin America, on the other hand, had a rather more mediocre performance, with a GDP expansion of 2.3% in that period. This was despite the good winds that blew in the 1990s, when the most important economic reforms were carried out in the region, and the commodity price boom between 2002 and 2011.