How Latin America Weathered The Global Financial Crisis

The global financial and economic turmoil of 2008–09 plunged Europe and the United States into their worst economic downturns in 75 years. Many experts feared that developing regions like Latin America, which had experienced many of their own crises in recent decades, would be even worse affected. Instead, Latin America suffered only limited damage. Indeed the region’s GDP is 20 percent higher than its pre-crisis level. José De Gregorio, governor of the Central Bank of Chile from 2007 to 2011, explains Latin America’s success with a perspective that only an insider can have. This book focuses mainly on the seven largest economies of Latin America—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela—which together account for more than 90 percent of regional output. The author argues that strong performance during the crisis resulted from the sound macroeconomic and financial policies that these countries followed beforehand. Their accomplishments allowed them to undertake significant monetary and fiscal expansion in the context of robust financial systems. De Gregorio acknowledges that there was also an element of luck—in terms of improved terms of trade. This is a candid, searching, and dramatic case study of crisis preparation—and crisis management.

The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region has weathered the global financial crisis reasonably well so far, although tighter global financial conditions began to take their toll on trade, capital flows and economic growth in late 2008. This resilience reflects the reforms put in place by many countries over the past decade to strengthen financial supervision and adopt sound macroeconomic policies. Building on this progress, the region's financial sector reform agenda now aims at further improvements, including steps aiming to improve compliance with the Basel Core Principles of Banking Supervision and to broaden and deepen domestic financial markets.

This paper analyzes the unprecedented resilience of Latin American countries to the global financial crisis. It argues that sound macroeconomic conditions, which allowed an unusual monetary and fiscal expansion, exchange rate flexibility, a strong and well--regulated financial system, high level of reserves, and a bit of luck coming from very high terms of trade, were central to good economic performance. Persevering along the road of strong macroeconomic and financial policies is necessary, but not sufficient, to go from recovery to sustained growth.

When the 2008 housing market bubble burst in the United States, a financial crisis rippled from the epi-center in the United States across borders into economies both near and far, causing persistent social and economic detriment in many countries. The Global Economic Crisis in Latin America: Impacts and Responses is an examination of the impacts and responses in the diverse Latin American region through the lens of three countries: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.

"This book explores economic growth in Latin America and its impact on the global financial crisis. It explores the social, economic, financial, and political aspects of economic growth in the Latin America region"--

This volume documents and explains the remarkable resilience of emerging market nations in East Asia and Latin America when faced with the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. Their quick bounceback from the crisis marked a radical departure from the past, such as when the 1982 debt shocks produced a decade-long recession in Latin America or when the Asian financial crisis dramatically slowed those economies in the late 1990s. Why? This volume suggests that these countries' resistance to the initial financial contagion is a tribute to financial-sector reforms undertaken over the past two decades. The rebound itself was a trade-led phenomenon, favoring the countries that had gone the farthest with macroeconomic restructuring and trade reform. Old labels used to describe "neoliberal versus developmentalist" strategies do not accurately capture the foundations of this recovery. These authors argue that policy learning and institutional reforms adopted in response to previous crises prompted policymakers to combine state and market approaches in effectively coping with the global financial crisis. The nations studied include Korea, China, India, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, accompanied by Latin American and Asian regional analyses that bring other emerging markets such as Chile and Peru into the picture. The substantial differences among the nations make their shared success even more remarkable and worthy of investigation. And although 2012 saw slowed growth in some emerging market nations, the authors argue this selective slowing suggests the need for deeper structural reforms in some countries, China and India in particular.

This book considers the historical and contemporary determinants of the financial crisis facing Latin America from a political economy perspective and compares the effects of and responses to the crisis in a number of countries. It discusses the internal policy errors that led to financial blow-ups.

Globalization is quite different from internationalization: the by-now global market economy overwhelmed the sovereignty of the old national states. Close to the 2007 crisis, some de-coupling effects were consequent in most developed countries in comparison with the ex-Third World. Latin America seemed to entail a "divergence" with the First World, as unlike the past, it was not hit by the financial crisis, but old historical fragilities invalidated the short positive cycle produced by high international prices. This work deals with this crisis and its basic differences from the older crises of the Thirties and Seventies.