The 1980s are considered as the "lost decade" of Latin American growth. Explain why?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Just as the Great Depression made it hard for developing countries to make payments on their foreign loans, the great recession of the 1980s also sparked a crisis over developing country debt. The fall in the industrial countries' aggregate demand had a direct negative impact on the developing countries. The problem was make worse by the dollar's sharp appreciation in the foreign exchange market, which raised the real value of the dollar debt burden substantially. The crisis began in August 1982 when Mexico announced that its central bank had run out of foreign reserves and that it could no longer meet payments on its $80 billion in foreign debt. Seeing potential similarities between Mexico and other large Latin American debtors such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, banks in the industrial countries, the largest private lenders to Latin America scrambled to reduce their risks by cutting off new credits and demanding repayment on earlier loans. The result was a widespread inability of developing countries to meet prior debt obligations, and a rapid move to the edge of a generalized default. Latin America was perhaps hardest hit, but so were soviet bloc countries like Poland that had borrowed from the European banks. Nonetheless, by the end of 1986 more than 40 countries had encountered severe financing problems. Growth had slowed sharply in much of the developing countries because they have to stop producing in order to pay the debtors.