The Bottom Line: The Fundamental Weaknesses of Latin American Finance

Throughout the 1980s, Latin America experimented with financial liberalisation, which was supposed to solve the perpetual weaknesses of low savings, lack of access to capital, and the resulting stultifying effects on growth. We find that fundamental weaknesses in regional financial systems continue. We suggest that there are three basic policy reactions: a deepening of neoliberal policies; a neo‐structural reform of them; and a Bolivarian social reform‐oriented approach. While the neo‐structural approach has yielded the most promising performance, it is still limited. We conclude that the success of reforms lies in understanding and changing the calculations of the political beneficiaries of the status quo.