Domestic bond markets have remained underdeveloped for much of Latin America’s modern history owing to a number of policy and structural impediments. The resulting structure of domestic government and private sector debt, which was heavily biased towards short-term and/or dollar-indexed liabilities, contributed to a worsening of the financial crises in the region during the 1990s and early 2000s. In recent years, however, domestic bond markets have constituted a growing source of financing for Latin American economies and of portfolio allocation for global investors (Figure 1). This has called into question the view that countries in the region cannot borrow in local currency at longer maturities, sometimes referred to.
