be that as it may, it is difficult to claim today - as it was during the 1980s - that what held litin america back was poor management of exchange rates. two decades of structural adjustment policies further integrated latin american economies with the global economy, without delivering on the promise of renewed repid growth (stallings and peres, 2000); when growth picked up and debt levels declined during the last decade, much of this was related to commodity exports and to the post-washington consensus policies of newly elected democratic regimes meanwhile, most asian countries escaped the debt crisis, using state intrevention to propel their economies and to integrate with the world economy on their own terms.