Stabilisation Policy in Mexico: The Fiscal Deficit and Macroeconomic Equilibrium 1960–77

Abstract

Stabilisation policy has possibly played a greater part in Mexican economic strategy than anywhere else in Latin America over the last twenty years. Between 1955 and 1970 Mexico was held up to the world as a case of Rostovian ‘takeoff’ in which the skilled application of stabilisation policy had preserved macroeconomic equilibrium in a period of rapid industrialisation, thereby strengthening the growth process itself; the severe macroeconomic disequilibrium after 1970 which culminated in the massive devaluation of August 1976 (the first for nearly a quarter of a century) has been attributed both to the abandonment of monetary conservatism and to the neglect of structural reform during the previous decade.1 This debate has a crucial importance in Mexico not only because of the need to understand the immediate past, but also because despite incipient oil wealth the strategic choice for the future still lies between a continuation of ‘desarrollo compartido’ and a return to ‘desarrollo estabilizador’2

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.