Capital Flows and Investment Performance : Lessons from Latin America

Countries receiving large-scale capital inflows are at risk if these flows do not find their way into productive and long-term investment, as the Asian crisis of the late 1990s has proven. This book, the result of a joint project between the OECD Development Centre and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), examines the policies of a group of major Latin American countries faced with large inflows. The authors conclude that domestic policies impact on the effects of capital inflows. They demonstrate that certain countries, particularly Chile and Colombia, have been able to use policy to direct capital inflows into investment and thereby reduce the risk of instability in the financial sector. Such policies lead to effective management of foreign capital inflows and the creation of a stable, growth-oriented environment conducive to more sound external investment. The lessons of this book are as applicable in other regions of the world as they are in Latin America.