This book examines the economic history of the Caribbean in the two hundred years since the Napoleonic Wars and is the first analysis to span the whole region. It is divided into three parts, each ...centered around a particular case study: the first focuses on the nineteenth century ('The Age of Free Trade'); the second considers the period up to 1960 ('The Age of Preferences'); and the final section concerns the half century from the Cuban Revolution to the present ('The Age of Globalization'). The study makes use of a specially constructed database to observe trends across the whole region and chart the progress of nearly thirty individual countries. Its findings challenge many long-standing assumptions about the region, and its in-depth case studies shed new light on the history of three countries in particular, namely Belize, Cuba and Haiti.
Beginning with the integration of Latin America into the world trading system centered on Europe and North America during the century before 1930, this 2003 book explores the successes and failures ...of export-led growth. Using new data on exports and a simple model to explore the relationship between exports and growth, the author pays particular attention to the question that has most concerned policy-makers in Latin America: how to transfer growth in the export sector to the rest of the economy, raising living standards and real income per head. The author examines the routes through which Latin American republics extricated themselves from the debt problem in pursuit of a new version of export-led growth. Taking its narrative from the end of the colonial epoch to the present, this book provides a comprehensive balanced portrait of the factors affecting economic development in Latin America.
This article examines the Belizean economy since independence in 1981 (excluding the impact of the virus COVID-19). During this time there have been significant changes in structure, especially the ...increase in the importance of exports of services, while population has expanded rapidly due both to natural increases and net inward migration. Slow economic growth in the first two decades led to an experiment with debt-led growth that ended in failure. The years since the global financial crisis in 2008/9 have proved especially difficult as a result of the debt overhang, the erosion of preferences for commodity exports and the increase in corruption. Belize has therefore found itself in a low-level equilibrium debt trap from which it is hard to escape. The level of poverty unsurprisingly has become severe.
The Asian financial crisis in 1997 reached Latin America the following year. The Brazilian devaluation in January 1999 demonstrated the vulnerability of Latin America's largest economy to external ...shocks, but it was also a consequence of fiscal imbalance. This article explores the background to the devaluation and explains the circumstances under which it might lead to an improvement in economic performance. The article then examines the impact of the devaluation on Brazil's neighbours in MERCOSUL, particularly Argentina. It also considers the lessons of the Brazilian devaluation in the context of attempts to reform the global financial architecture and in the light of the volatility of capital flows to emerging markets. The main conclusion is that the impact of the devaluation will be felt most strongly in Brazil and that a successful outcome will require economic and political reforms over and above those already adopted by the Cardoso administration.
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