ABSTRACT
Highly indebted countries, particularly the Latin American ones, presented dis- mal economic outcomes in the 1990s’ which are the consequence of the “growth cum foreign savings strategy”, or the Second Washington Consensus. Coupled with liber- alization of international financial flows, such strategy, which did not make part of the first consensus, led the countries, in the wave of a new world wide capital flow cycle, to high current account deficits and increase in foreign debt, ignoring the sol- vency constraint and the debt threshold. In practical terms it involved overvalued currencies (low exchange rates) and high interest rates; in policy terms, the attempt to control de budget deficit while the current account deficit was ignored. The para- doxical consequence was the adoption by highly indebted countries of “exchange rate populism”, a less obvious but more dangerous form of economic populism.
KEYWORDS:
Development; foreign savings; current-account deficit; capital flows
