Macroeconomic Stability in Developing Countries: How Much is Enough?

Abstract

In the 1990s macroeconomic policies improved in a majority of developing countries, but the growth dividend from such improvement fell short of expectations, and a policy agenda focused on stability turned out to be associated with a multiplicity of financial crises. Montiel and Serven take a retrospective look at the content and implementation of the macroeconomic reform agenda of the 1990s. They review the progress achieved with fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies across the developing world, and the effectiveness of the changing policy framework in promoting stability and growth. The main lesson is that slow growth and frequent crises resulted, more often than not, from shortcomings in the reform agenda of the 1990s. These shortcomings essentially concern the depth and breadth of the macroeconomic reform agenda, its attention to macroeconomic vulnerabilities, and the complementary reforms outside the macroeconomic sphere.

This paper - a joint product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, and the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to draw policy lessons from the development experience of the 1990s.

JEL Classification: E52, E62, F32, F34, F43