Financial dependency and growth cycles in Latin American countries

This paper argues that there was a remarkable similarity in the external cycles in Latin America's economic history. The desarrollo hacia fuera, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean earlier designation for the World Bank's "outward-oriented" model, that prevailed in the last part of the nineteenth century until 1930, was from the beginning a financial-export model where financial integration to the world economy played a central role. An orthodox economic policy based on fiscal contraction, a high rate of interest, and incentives to external debt in order to sustain convertibility and free capital flows was a permanent strategy of this model. After a long period distant from the world financial markets, many Latin American countries received throughout the 1970s and especially during the 1990s, huge volumes of financial capital that brought about once again a similar pattern and strategy of international integration.