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 has intensified as they struggle under the burden of an enormous external debt. In 1988, more than six years after the onset of the crisis,...

The paper develops a model of seigniorage in an open economy, linking inflation, the government budget and the external balance. It introduces financial markets and interest rates in the traditional Cagan style model of inflationary dynamics and it evaluates the experiences of Brazil and Mexico....