The Mexican crisis of 1994 raised throughout the world a number of questions about the sustainability -- and even the merits -- of the market oriented reform process in Latin America and other regions. Understanding how events unfolded in Mexico during the early 1990s continues to be...

For over a century social analysts have debated the connection between trade policy and economic performance. This controversy continues today, even as the world is experiencing an unprecedented period of trade liberalization, and in spite of numerous empirical studies that claim to have found a...

In the mid-1970s Chile initiated a deep market-oriented reform program aimed at opening up the economy, privatizing state owned enterprises and stabilizing the macroeconomy. In the 1980s Chile began to grow at increasingly rapid rates -- between 1986 and 1995 the average rate of growth bordered...

The Mexican peso crisis of December 1994 sent shock waves through the world's financial and policy communities. What is to some extent surprising is not that the Mexican economy faced a major currency crisis, but that so many analysts and observers were shocked by this turn of events. Mexico had...

In recent years, analysts and policy makers alike have been evaluating the nexus between exchange rates and macroeconomic stability. Among the most important questions is why have some countries adopted rigid, including fixed, exchange-rate paper addresses this question from a political economy...

This paper analyzes Latin America's experience with fiscal adjustment during the last decade. The paper discusses in detail how some countries -- most notably Argentina, Chile and Mexico -- were successfully able to eliminate their fiscal deficits in a relatively short period of time. Their...

This paper analyzes the determinants of savings in the world economy, and discusses why saving ratios have been so uneven across countries. A distinction is made between private and government savings, using panel data for 36 countries, from 1970 to 1992. In particular, it is assumed that...

This paper documents and evaluates the process of trade reforms in Latin America from the mid-1980s until 1993. It provides an analytical and historical discussion of the consequences of industrial policies in the region, from the early 1950s when import-substitution ideas were supported by the...

This paper reviews the experience of Latin American countries with structural reforms, and discusses the relationship between macroeconomic stabilization and trade liberalization programs undertaken in the region since the early 1980s. The problem of sequencing of stabilization and structural...

This paper analyzes the relationship between trade policy and economic performance. The paper is divided in two fundamental parts. The first one uses a cross country data set to investigate the relationship between trade policy and productivity growth. It is found that countries that are more...