New and consistent series for Latin American real incomes, life expectancy and adult literacy over the twentieth century reveal that living standards rose most rapidly between the nineteen-thirties and -seventies, a period characterised by increased state intervention and reduced trade openness. Within the region, Brazil and Mexico advanced most over the century as a whole despite the early start made by Argentina and Chile, although convergence between larger countries was accompanied by divergence from smaller ones. There was no sustained narrowing of the income gap with the US at all between 1900 and 2000 but some convergence in living standards due to improved life expectancy. Our new estimates of regional per capita income also permit a clearer comparison with both Europe and Asia. The major advances in living standards achieved in the middle decades of the century were closely related to early industrialisation, rapid urbanisation and the extension of primary health and education. Subsequent economic volatility and fiscal fragility limited further increases in living standards, undermining social consensus on development strategy.
The low pace of Latin American productivity growth in recent decades, despite extensive economic reforms, has yet to be understood in a longer-run context where factors such as demographic changes, structural shifts, and investment levels can be taken fully into account. The OxLAD database provides comparable sectoral output and workforce series over 1900-2000 for the six leading economies in the region for the first time. Our analysis of this new dataset shows that: intersectoral resource reallocation reduced aggregate productivity growth in all three periods; total factor productivity growth was low throughout the century, and even negative in the closing three decades; and thus factor accumulationinvestment in fixed capital and skilled labor-was the main source of productivity growth in Latin America during the twentieth century.JEL Codes: O1, O4, N3, N5, N6
This paper extends and modifies the Keynesian critique of inflation targeting with reference to stabilisation policy in emerging market economies. The IMF 'basic monetary programming framework' for developing countries uses government borrowing and the exchange rate as policy instruments in order to achieve specific inflation and balance of payments targets. This paper first adapts this standard model in order to include short-term capital flows and the floating exchange rate arising from financial liberalisation. In this way, the macroeconomic consequences of the current Fund focus on inflation targeting and the use of a single monetary policy instrument (the interest rate, combined with rigid fiscal and reserve 'rules') in emerging market economies can be demonstrated. Second, the paper encompasses the structuralist critique of the negative effect of inflation targeting on capacity utilisation and trade competitiveness, leading to an argument for counter-cyclical monetary policy in response to external shocks. An alternative model is constructed within a comparable macroeconomic framework to that of the IMF in order to permit the shortcomings of inflation targeting to be rigorously demonstrated. A macroeconomic stabilisation policy based on real exchange rate targeting, bank credit regulation and an active fiscal stance is shown be more effective in supporting growth and investment.
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