But in 1982, during a period of high real interest rates and slow growth around the globe, Mexico briefly defaulted on its debt, an event that marked the beginning of the debt crisis of the 1980s. The crisis effectively closed off the region's access to international credit.
This means that the so-called output gap, which measures the distance between the level of production and its potential, and which is generally used to estimate the path of economic recovery, could be substantially lower than the one estimated with traditional statistical methodology.