ABSTRACT
One of the most striking phenomena of post-Second World War economic development in Latin America – and one of the many issues which I have discussed with my friend Geoff Harcourt, to whom I dedicate this chapter (a fellow post-Keynesian who also thinks that savings matter!) – is Latin America’s systematic poor savings performance. In fact, one of the main economic arguments in favour of the neoliberal economic reforms recently implemented in the region was that (mainly through financial ‘deepening’ and the liberalization of the capital account) these reforms should be able to lift the savings performance of the region significantly. However, with the exception of Chile (and even in this case, only since the late 1980s, over a decade after the beginning of the reforms, and after the implementation of drastic tax reforms), savings, particularly private savings, have been particularly ‘sticky’ in Latin America (ending up, if anything, even lower after the first wave of neoliberal reforms).
