These are challenging questions of monetary economics and political economy, and their answers have important implications for the economic future of the Western Hemisphere - including the United States, which stands to benefit greatly from increased trade with and investment in a more prosperous Latin America.
In Japan, prices declined by about one third during five years in the 1880s. In the United States, prices fell by a quarter in three years in the 1930s during the Great Depression. BIS Review 42/2003  1  For a little more than fifty years after World War Two, however, we had hardly experienced deflation.