This article examines the principal reasons for the poor Latin American economic performance in contrast to Asian success in the last decade. These include an adverse international economy that discriminated against large debtors, a set of domestic distortions introduced by excess external debt, and a political incapacity to implement coherent and consistent adjustment policies.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
1. Calculated from International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, 1988 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 1988).
2.
2. Angus Maddison, Two Crises: Latin America and Asia, 1929-38 and 1973-83 (Paris: OECD Development Centre, 1985), p. 53.
3.
3. Deepak Lal, The Poverty of “Development Economics” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 103.
4.
4. Lawrence E. Harrison, Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), p. 165.
5.
5. For a more extensive and explicitly comparative treatment of Latin America and Asia, see my “Some Reflections on Comparative Latin American Economic Performance and Policy” (Economics Working Paper 8754, University of California, Berkeley, Sept. 1987).
6.
idem , “Alternative Approaches and Solutions to the Debt of Developing Countries,” in International Finance and Trade in a Polycentric World, ed. S. Borner (New York: Macmillan, 1988).
7.
7. For these calculations, see Anne O. Krueger, “Origins of the Developing Countries' Debt Crisis,”Journal of Development Economics, 27:175 ff. (1987).
8.
See also Krueger, “Origins,” for discussion of comparative Latin American and Korean adjustment effort.
9.
9. For this approach, see the contributions to J. M. Buchanan, R. D. Tollison, and G. Tullock, eds., Toward a Theory of Rent Seeking Society (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980).
