Book review: A Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America

Monetary and financial crises have been recurrent in Latin America for several decades, and the book sets out to investigate why these economies have been so unstable. The main argument is that Latin American governments have sustained fiscal deficits that have translated into public debt, when this was possible, and into excessive monetary issuance, when this was necessary. The book continues to argue that governments have been unwilling or unable to keep their budget spending within the limits of the tax revenues they could generate, so their policies have been the main culprit of inflation, currency devaluations, and crisis. The book concludes that some countries have learned their lesson as of late and have resorted to fiscal stability policies, hence showing the others the way to follow.
The book is relatively long and packed with quantitative data and statistics. It contains two introductory chapters and 11 cases, each of which contains a country case study and one or two short comment pieces.[...]