6777 COHA Report, Strauss-Kahn’s Visit to Latin America: A New Economic Policy?

Strauss-Kahn’s Visit to Latin America: A New Economic Policy?

President Obama is not the only world figure who has headed south recently. During the first week of March, director-general of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, visited Latin America. During his fast-moving tour across Panama, Uruguay and Brazil, he sought to highlight some of the policies being implemented in the region in the wake of the recent global financial crisis.

For the most part, Latin America has managed to fend off the brunt of the world economic downturn by avoiding the West’s prescriptions—costly errors of yesteryear—featuring canned formulas and impositions by international financial institutions and the developed world that were so popular during the nineties. By all accounts, Latin American countries, even before the global crisis set in, took a realist, home-grown perspective about how to maintain sustainable growth and avoid the financial contagion which later spread to other regions of the developed world.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Fellow Eloy Fisher