Policymakers, business leaders, and scholars from across the Americas convene at 28th Alamos Alliance

How will ultra-loose “countercyclical” fiscal and monetary policies affect macro performance in developing countries? How will the prospects of a central digital currency transform traditional banking and capital market systems? Will digital currencies lead to a market-based scenario of competing private monies in the not-so-distant future? How long will Latin American economies, utterly decimated by the pandemic and lockdown policies, have to endure before they begin to see the light at the end of the recovery tunnel?

Policymakers, business leaders, and world-renowned scholars from across the Americas came together on Friday, April 30th, to participate in the 28th edition of the Alamos Alliance, addressing these and other questions under the general title The Economics of the Covid-19 Disruption: Radical Uncertainty, Digital Money, and Post-Pandemic Recovery.

Read the Executive Summary of Alamos Alliance XVIII (2021).

The annual event, which usually takes place in the colonial town of Alamos, Sonora, was adapted to these atypical times and held as special virtual meeting with over one-hundred attendees convening in a half-day gathering of highly stimulating discussion.

Participants included Carmen Reinhart, now vice president & chief economist of the World Bank Group; Professors Robert Topel, Kevin Murphy, and Casey Mulligan from University of Chicago; former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm; Tom Saving, Professor Emeritus from Texas A&M University; and Pedro Aspe, former Minister of Finance in Mexico; and Sebastian Edwards, the distinguished Chilean economist who is Henry Ford II Professor of International Economics at the Anderson School of Management, UCLA.

The event also featured a brief presentation of Anne O. Krueger´s latest book, International Trade, in a conversation with Professor Manuel Suárez-Mier.

Al “Alito” Harberger, co-founder of the Alamos Alliance, shared closing remarks.

Roberto Salinas-León, director of Atlas Network’s Center for Latin America and who currently presides the Alamos Alliance, commented that “although we all wish to be gathering in-person, the decision to come together virtually this year enabled us to have more participants from many corners of the world, thereby ensuring for a productive and enlightening exchange of ideas.”

Alamos Alliance is planning to convene in person in early 2022.