This volume examines the record of Latin American adjustment efforts and assesses the challenges that lie ahead. It examines the Washington consensus on how ten major policy instruments - including fiscal deficits, tax reform, exchange rates, and deregulation - should be used to address Latin America's current problems. Ten country studies and accompanying commentaries assess public attitudes in each country toward these reforms, the progress made since 1982 in implementing them, and the impact of policy changes on economic performance.
This volume is a successor of sorts to the Institute's 1986 volume Toward Renewed Economic Growth in Latin America, which blazed the trail for the market-oriented economic reforms that were adopted in Latin America in the subsequent years. It again presents the work of a group of leading Latin American economists who were asked to think about the nature of the economic policy agenda that the region should be pursuing after a decade that was punctuated by crises, achieved disappointingly slow growth, and saw no improvement in the region's highly skewed income distribution. The study diagnoses the first-generation (liberalizing and stabilizing) reforms that are still lacking, the complementary second-generation (institutional) reforms that are necessary to provide the institutional infrastructure of a market economy with an egalitarian bias, and the new initiatives that are needed to crisis-proof the economies of the region to end its perpetual series of crises. Contributors: Daniel Artana, Nancy Birdsall, Roberto Bouzas, Saúl Keifman, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, Ricardo López Murphy, Claudio de Moura Castro, Fernando Navajas, Patricio Navia, Liliana Rojas-Suarez, Jaime Saavedra, Miguel Székely, Andrés Velasco, John Williamson, and Laurence Wolff.
The fourteen papers presented in this volume are thought-provoking studies of the economic adjustment of Latin America to the difficult external environment of the 1980s. The debt problems of Latin America form the background for the analyses undertaken in this book. The articles go beyond description of the debt problems to offer insights on the more fundamental long-range problems facing policymakers in the region. Positive analyses into the nature of the adjustment process and insights into future institutional changes that could improve the functioning of the Latin American economies highlight the book.
Perhaps the most popular of all Institute products, selected Working Papers are now available in a print format. These papers contain the preliminary results of ongoing Institute research. The book covers a wide range of topics including offshoring, central banks, Eurasian growth, Europe, and international reserves. Included in the book are papers by Edwin M. Truman, Adam Posen, J. Bradford Jensen, Anders Aslund, C. Randall Henning, and Jacob Kirkegaard. Volume II contains papers from 2006. Future volumes will be published on a semi-regular schedule as material is available.
The debt crisis of 1982 caused serious economic disruptions in most developing countries. Reform, Recovery, and Growth explains why some of these countries have recovered from the debt crisis, while more than a decade later others continue to stagnate. Among the questions addressed are: What are the requirements for a stabilization policy that reduces inflation in a reasonable amount of time at an acceptable cost? What are the effects of structural reforms, especially trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization, on growth in the short and long runs? How do macroeconomic instability and adjustment policies affect income distribution and poverty? How does the specific design of structural adjustment efforts affect results? In this companion to Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America, the authors confirm that macroeconomic stability has a positive effect on income distribution. The volume presents case studies that describe in detail the stabilization experiences in Brazil, Israel, Argentina, and Bolivia, and also includes discussion of Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Turkey.
