Latin America, the Debt Crisis, and the IMF

With the advent of the debt crisis in 1982, the International Monetary Fund found itself called upon to steer countries out of debt and payments problems. IMF missions soon began criss crossing the globe, doling out the orthodox medicine we have examined throughout this book. Despite the similarity of its policy prescriptions, however, there were two significant differences between the IMF's role in the pre-crisis period and its new role in the 1980s.