A major, new, and comprehensive look at six decades of macroeconomic policies across the region What went wrong with the economic development of Latin America over the past half-century? Along with periods of poor economic performance, the region’s countries have been plagued by a wide variety of economic crises. This major new work brings together dozens of leading economists to explore the economic performance of the ten largest countries in South America and of Mexico. Together they advance the fundamental hypothesis that, despite different manifestations, these crises all have been the result of poorly designed or poorly implemented fiscal and monetary policies. Each country is treated in its own section of the book, with a lead chapter presenting a comprehensive database of the country’s fiscal, monetary, and economic data from 1960 to 2017. The chapters are drawn from one-day academic conferences—hosted in all but one case, in the focus country—with participants including noted economists and former leading policy makers. Cowritten with Nobel Prize winner Thomas J. Sargent, the editors’ introduction provides a conceptual framework for analyzing fiscal and monetary policy in countries around the world, particularly those less developed. A final chapter draws conclusions and suggests directions for further research. A vital resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and for economic researchers and policy makers, A Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America, 1960–2017 goes further than any book in stressing both the singularities and the similarities of the economic histories of Latin America’s largest countries. Contributors: Mark Aguiar, Princeton U; Fernando Alvarez, U of Chicago; Manuel Amador, U of Minnesota; Joao Ayres, Inter-American Development Bank; Saki Bigio, UCLA; Luigi Bocola, Stanford U; Francisco J. Buera, Washington U, St. Louis; Guillermo Calvo, Columbia U; Rodrigo Caputo, U of Santiago; Roberto Chang, Rutgers U; Carlos Javier Charotti, Central Bank of Paraguay; Simón Cueva, TNK Economics; Julián P. Díaz, Loyola U Chicago; Sebastian Edwards, UCLA; Carlos Esquivel, Rutgers U; Eduardo Fernández Arias, Peking U; Carlos Fernández Valdovinos (former Central Bank of Paraguay); Arturo José Galindo, Banco de la República, Colombia; Márcio Garcia, PUC-Rio; Felipe González Soley, U of Southampton; Diogo Guillen, PUC-Rio; Lars Peter Hansen, U of Chicago; Patrick Kehoe, Stanford U; Carlos Gustavo Machicado Salas, Bolivian Catholic U; Joaquín Marandino, U Torcuato Di Tella; Alberto Martin, U Pompeu Fabra; Cesar Martinelli, George Mason U; Felipe Meza, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México; Pablo Andrés Neumeyer, U Torcuato Di Tella; Gabriel Oddone, U de la República; Daniel Osorio, Banco de la República; José Peres Cajías, U of Barcelona; David Perez-Reyna, U de los Andes; Fabrizio Perri, Minneapolis Fed; Andrew Powell, Inter-American Development Bank; Diego Restuccia, U of Toronto; Diego Saravia, U de los Andes; Thomas J. Sargent, New York U; José A. Scheinkman, Columbia U; Teresa Ter-Minassian (formerly IMF); Marco Vega, Pontificia U Católica del Perú; Carlos Végh, Johns Hopkins U; François R. Velde, Chicago Fed; Alejandro Werner, IMF.

As Bolivia reels from the collapse of the government in November 2019, a wave of social protests, and now the impact of Covid-19, this book asks: where next for Bolivia? After almost 14 years in power, the government of Bolivia’s first indigenous president collapsed in 2019 amidst widescale protest and allegations of electoral fraud. The contested transitional government that emerged was quickly struck by the impacts of the Covid-19 public health crisis. This book reflects on this critical moment in Bolivia’s development from the perspectives of politics, the economy, the judiciary and the environment. It asks what key issues emerged during Evo Morales’s administration and what are the main challenges awaiting the next government in order to steer the country through a new and uncertain road ahead. As the world considers what the ultimate legacy of Morales’s left-wing social experiment will be, this book will be of great interest to researchers across the fields of Latin American studies, development, politics, and economics, as well as to professionals active in the promotion of development in the country and the region.

For dozens of developing countries, the financial upheavals of the 1980s have set back economic development by a decade or more. Poverty in those countries have intensified as they struggle under the burden of an enormous external debt. In 1988, more than six years after the onset of the crisis, almost all the debtor countries were still unable to borrow in the international capital markets on normal terms. Moreover, the world financial system has been disrupted by the prospect of widespread defaults on those debts. Because of the urgency of the present crisis, and because similar crises have recurred intermittently for at least 175 years, it is important to understand the fundamental features of the international macroeconomy and global financial markets that have contributed to this repeated instability. Developing Country Debt and the World Economy contains nontechnical versions of papers prepared under the auspices of the project on developing country debt, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The project focuses on the middle-income developing countries, particularly those in Latin America and East Asia, although many lessons of the study should apply as well to other, poorer debtor countries. The contributors analyze the crisis from two perspectives, that of the international financial system as a whole and that of individual debtor countries. Studies of eight countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea, and Turkey—explore the question of why some countries succumbed to serious financial crises while other did not. Each study was prepared by a team of two authors—a U.S.-based research and an economist from the country under study. An additional eight papers approach the problem of developing country debt from a global or "systemic" perspective. The topics they cover include the history of international sovereign lending and previous debt crises, the political factors that contribute to poor economic policies in many debtor nations, the role of commercial banks and the International Monetary Fund during the current crisis, the links between debt in developing countries and economic policies in the industrialized nations, and possible new approaches to the global management of the crisis.

The history of the microfinance movement in Latin America, brought to life through the lens of the Bolivian experience. The study investigates the transformation of NGOs into formal financial institutions, examining microfinance under the conditions of commercialization and competition.