The Mexican Economic Crisis of 1982 and the Brazilian Economic Crisis of 1999:Critical Junctures in Economic Policy?

This paper utilises a new critical juncture framework to help us determine whether changes to Mexican macroeconomic policy in the early 1980s, and Brazilian macroeconomic policy at the turn of the century, were clean breaks with the past, or continuations of previously established policy pathways. The framework consists of three elements, which must be identified in sequence in order to declare, with some certainty, if an event was a critical juncture. These are crisis, ideational change, and radical policy change.