Now available in print and online
The Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America Project was launched in 2013 by the University of Chicago’s Lars Peter Hansen in his former capacity as the Director of the Becker Friedman Institute and as part of its fiscal policy initiative. Upon the advice of Thomas Sargent, New York University, and former Distinguished Fellow of the BFI, and Fernando Alvarez, University of Chicago, the Institute provided funding and other support for this vibrant project initiated and led throughout by the University of Minnesota’s Timothy Kehoe and the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s Juan Pablo Nicolini. In supporting and hosting this project, the Institute envisioned an intensive research program to produce a comprehensive monetary and fiscal history of the ten largest countries of South America plus Mexico since 1960. Under Kehoe’s and Nicolini’s leadership, and with the extensive efforts of a large number of scholars with expertise on the macroeconomic experiences of Latin American countries, this project delivered with great success on its initial ambition. The authors of the chapters are country experts who participated in numerous meetings over six years to discuss and receive feedback on their findings that were framed in ways to facilitate comparisons and open the door to novel insights applicable more broadly. Along with the scholarship represented in this book, these economists worked with BFI to create a dynamic database for the eleven Latin American countries under review (https://mafhola.uchicago.edu/), which will inform and inspire scholarship for years to come.
Backgrond photo by bored photographer on Unsplash
El desarrollo es un viaje con más náufragos que navegantes.
Development is a voyage with more castaways than navigators.
—Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina, 1971.
¿En qué momento se había jodido [América Latina]?
At what precise moment had [Latin America] screwed itself up?
—Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversación en la catedral, 1969.
The Manifold version of A Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America, 1960–2017 has Microsoft Excel files that have the data for the government budget accounting for each of the eleven countries whose modern economic histories are studied in the book. The Excel files also perform the budget accounting developed by Timothy J. Kehoe, Juan Pablo Nicolini, and Thomas J. Sargent in the chapter, “A Framework for Studying the Monetary and Fiscal History of Latin America.” In the Framework—Appendix PDF, there are step-by-step instructions how to do the budget accounting for Argentina and Mexico using Excel. The calculations are those performed in the Excel files titled Argentina—Budget Accounting and Mexico—Budget Accounting. The sources for the data in the Excel files are given in the Argentina—Data Description and Mexico—Data Description PDFs.
Using the Framework—Appendix PDF and one of the MS Excel files, the interested reader can do the Kehoe-Nicolini-Sargent budget accounting exercise for another country by plugging that country’s data into the relevant columns in the Data worksheet in the MS Excel file. The calculations are automatically done in the Calculation worksheet. The Results worksheet uses the complete government budget accounting in the Calculation worksheet to construct whatever table is presented in “The History of COUNTRYNAME” chapter. The user who wants to modifying one of the MS Excel budget accounting files needs to be careful in expanding or contracting data columns in the Data worksheet and the corresponding columns in the Calculation worksheet by the same amount and copying the calculation formulas where necessary.
In addition to the MS Excel files for budget accounting, there are PDFs with sources for all of the data used in the budget accounting. There are also MS Excel files with the data for all figures. The data appendix files can be accessed from the resources section or by clicking on the cubes next to title of the chapter or discussion within the body of the text.
The naming conventions for files are:
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