Since the end of World War II, Argentina has been through an uninterrupted series of financial/fiscal and monetary crises that have gradually eroded the credibilityof the economic institutions of the country. In the period from 1970 to 1990 alone, the Argentine economy experienced seven currency...

This paper analyses several severe financial crises observed in the history of capitalism which led to a longer period of stagnation or low growth. Comparative case studies of the Great Depression, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s and the Japanese crisis of the 1990s and 2000s are...

We describe Peru's experience of chronic inflation through the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the need for inflationary taxation in a regime of fiscal dominance of monetary policy. Hyperinflation occurred when further debt accumulation became unavailable, and a populist administration engaged in...

Studying the modern economic histories of the ten largest countries in South America and Mexico teaches us the lack of fiscal discipline has been at the root of most of the region's macroeconomic instability. The lack of fiscal discipline, however, takes various forms not measured in the primary...

An optimal monetary policy Taylor rule is developed for an open economy, which we then estimate following a Markov regime-switching model for quarterly data from Colombia during 1990-2011. We find two opposite monetary regimes characterized by different policy rules: until October 2000 the...

Conventional monetary theory holds that a country can only possess one nominal anchor in the long run. With an open capital account, the country must decide between an exchange rate target or independent monetary policy. The latter implies inflation targeting with a benchmark interest rate...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the monetary and fiscal history of Mexico using as framework the model of Sargent and Wallace (1981). I study the period 1960-2016. I evaluate the ability of the model to explain the crises of 1982 and 1994. The model can explain the 1982 Debt Crisis,...

Argentina's modern economic history offers perhaps the clearest evidence in support of a rules-based fiscal and monetary policy framework. From 1899 until 1914 the country abided by the rules of the gold standard and experienced rapid GDP growth with price stability. After WWI and until 1939,...

The paper is aimed at quantifying empirically the monetary transmission mechanism for Argentine, and at analyzing the responses of output, inflation, and money market mutual funds (MMMF) to a positive monetary shock. The idea of incorporating MMMF into the system is to understand how economic...

In the late 1970s, numerous domestic and external factors began to destabilize the Central American economies. In some cases, a misperception of the seriousness of these problems and a desire to prolong the economic bonanza led to the implementation of countercyclical policies and the...