Traditionally most countries in Latin America have only considered pegs to the USdollar.
Only relatively recently has attention been devoted to the (for now mostly
theoretical) option of some kind of regional monetary integration.11
Up to the collapse of the Argentine currency board in December 2001, there was a clear
tendency in most Latin American countries to have a formally declared or de-facto peg
to the US-dollar, some going even so far as to dollarize completely (Ecuador, El
Salvador).12 In their assessment of the performance of exchange rate regimes in Latin
America, Hausmann et al. (1999) accordingly stress the revealed preference of most
countries to have fixed exchange rates, even if they had formally declared floating rates.
They attribute this to the fact that flexible rates tended to be accompanied by higher
interest rates, smaller financial systems, a higher sensitivity of domestic rates to