Regional Financial Cooperation : Issues in South America

There is an emergence of regional financial cooperation in South America as a result of the insufficiency shown by IFIs in crisis periods. In this paper we want to argue that regional financial cooperation serves to cover any or all of the external, fiscal and, savings and investment gaps, in a new regionalism context where the actors are no longer the States only but also the private sector. The requirement for monetary cooperation is financial stability which exists amongst certain subsets of countries but not amongst all. Equally, Latin America has turned into South America and as such is organised around UNASUR due to the political perception that Mexico and the Central American Community countries were shifting towards a US led dominance while the Mercosur countries centred around Brazil. This country launched local currency payment mechanisms and have not in been used widely due to the lack of monetary policy coordination.but equally they would require a a change in the IMF definition of what is a reserve currency. A regional payment system(SUCRE) was also launched and is not used widely for the same reason. Finally there are new research areas found after the Euro crisis that must be studied in order to ensure greater regional financial stability