However, many Latin American countries experienced declining dependency ratios during the past 40 years without enjoying the rapid economic growth of East Asian countries. It has been argued that recurrent financial crises and high trade tariffs in Latin America reduced the size of its demographic dividend (Bloom, Canning and Sevilla, 2001).
The Australian dollar was floated in December 1983, and after a few years of turbulence in the mid 1980s, has generally behaved as a floating rate should in the period since then. While it was more volatile in the 1980s than the major currencies such as the US dollar, yen and Deutschemark, in the nineties it has generally been less volatile than they have.