The Mexican peso crisis of December 1994 sent shock waves through the world's financial and policy communities. What is to some extent surprising is not that the Mexican economy faced a major currency crisis, but that so many analysts and observers were shocked by this turn of events. Mexico had a remarkable historical precedent: merely a dozen years earlier Chile suffered a prophetically similar crisis. Like Mexico during the 1980s, Chile during the 1970s undertook major structural reforms characterized by a drastic opening of the economy, a sweeping privatization program and a major deregu- lation effort aimed at creating a modern financial sector. In Chile, as in Mexico more than a decade later, the use of a predetermined exchange rate to eliminate inflation, combined with very large capital inflows that were intermediated by a weak banking system, generated a situation of exchange- rate overvaluation, a vulnerable financial sector and eventually the collapse of the currency. This paper provides a comparative analysis of some macroeconomic aspects of the Chilean and Mexican crises and discusses the extent to which exchange-rate-based stabilization programs are successful in reducing or even eliminating inflationary inertia? The paper provides a brief overview of the Chilean and Mexican reform and stabilization programs started in 1975 and 1985. I develop a theoretical model on the effects of exchange- rate-based stabilization programs on inflationary inertia. The model emphasizes the roles of government preferences and credibility. I use detailed data on Chile and Mexico to assess whether these programs affected the time series properties of inflation; more specifically, I investigate whether they reduced inflationary inertia.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
5794.
Length: Date of creation: Oct 1996 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5794
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Find related papers by JEL classification: E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Rudiger Dornbusch & Stanley Fischer, 1993.
"Moderate Inflation,"
NBER Working Papers
3896, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Johannes Jäger, 1999.
"Pionier der Globalisierung: Chile,"
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sre-disc-67, Department of City and Regional Development, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration.
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