H. Levato: Formal Education in Astronomy in Latin America

The speaker starts with an overview over the countries and places, where astronomy can be studied both at undergraduate and at graduate level. The amount of activity and students scales with the size of the country. 90% of the 500 PhD students in astronomy are in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

There is an intermediate group of countries, where there is serious effort in astronomy, but it would take more resources to consolidate their astronomy programs. The largest number of countries however have seriuous deficiencies in that respect. The speaker also found a correlation between the astronomical effort and the reply-time to emails. :-)

Although there are many astronomical facilities in latin america, it is the people who write the papers and it often is manpower which is the limiting factor.

In a comment it was pointed out, that Venezuela probably should belong to the first group, which the speaker already had suggested, but with a question mark.