ABSTRACT

In the 1970s and 1980s, the world knew desperate Latin American debtors, successful East Asian interventionists, and unsuccessful Soviet and East European planners. Each of these regions had its own economic problems and used its own institutions to try to solve them. By the end of the 1980s, Latin America had overcome the debt crisis through a mixture of structural adjustment and partial debt write-downs. The East Asian tigers continued to be so successful that the relative closure of their economies led to trade conflicts with the US and others, and ultimately forced them to gradually open up. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and its satellites had largely planned themselves out of existence.