Abstract
The 1980s became known as ‘the lost decade’ in Latin America. For the region as a whole, GDP grew little more than 1 per cent per year compared with almost 6 per cent in the previous decade. As a result, per capita GDP fell by more than 10 per cent in the 1980s. There were few exceptions — Chile and Colombia among them — to this declining trend in real income. The recession of 1981–2 in the industrial countries and the debt crisis that erupted in the summer of 1982 had much to do with the sharp turnaround in the economic well-being of Latin America in the 1980s. But the early 1990s saw substantial improvement as economic reforms were adopted and some debt relief was obtained.
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Notes
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© 1994 Robert Solomon
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Solomon, R. (1994). Democratisation and Reform in Latin America. In: The Transformation of the World Economy, 1980–93. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23675-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23675-6_12
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