Global Finance from a Latin American Viewpoint

The Inter-American Development Bank and the OECD Development Centre created the International Forum on Latin American Perspectives as an annual meeting place of ideas and strategies from Latin America and from the OECD region. The tenth meeting of the Forum was held in Paris in November 1999 and this book contains contributions from that meeting. Its broad conclusion is that reform of the international financial system must take place in the context of partnership between the private and the public international sectors in order to provide the conditions for stability and growth. The Forum debated whether the current reforms of the global financial markets were succeeding in identifying and addressing major distortions to international capital flows between developed and developing countries, essentially, the moral hazard versus sovereign risk question. Particular attention was devoted to: bailing the private sector into crisis prevention and resolution, including under the Paris Club framework; the recently proposed revisions to the Basel Accord on bank capital requirements; and the appropriate exchange rate regime in Latin America.