Financial liberalization in Latin-America in the 1990s
Subtitle: a reassessment
By: Joshua Aizenman.
Contributors: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series ;; working paper 11145; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) ;; working paper no. 11145.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Subjects: Financial services industry -- Deregulation -- Latin America.; Investments -- Government policy -- Latin America.; Saving and investment -- Latin America.; Economic stabilization -- Latin America.
Description: "This paper studies the experience of Latin-America [LATAM] with financial liberalization in the 1990s.  The rush towards financial liberalizations in the early 1990s was associated with expectations that external financing would alleviate the scarcity of saving in LATAM, thereby increasing investment and growth.  Yet, the data and several case studies suggest that the gains from external financing are overrated.  The bottleneck inhibiting economic growth is less the scarcity of saving, and more the scarcity of good governance.  A possible interpretation for these findings is that in countries where private savings and investments were taxed in an arbitrary and unpredictable way, the credibility of a new regime could not be assumed or imposed.  Instead, credibility must be acquired as an outcome of a learning process.  Consequently, increasing the saving and investment rates tends to be a time consuming process.  This also suggests that greater political instability and polarization would induce consumers to be more cautious in increasing their saving and investment rates following a reform.  Hence, reaching a sustained take-off in Latin-America is a harder task to accomplish than in Asia"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
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Mode of access: World Wide Web.