Escaping the Governance Trap: Economic Reform in the Northern Triangle

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered the global economic landscape, with the smallest and most vulnerable economies particularly hard hit. In the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the crisis has cost lives and livelihoods. It has impacted both the demand and supply sides of the economy, posing difficult policy tradeoffs. Risks to macroeconomic stability are now growing. Each country will likely exit the crisis with an even greater need for reform.

Escaping the Governance Trap: Economic Reform in the Northern Triangle provides a framework for understanding the challenges of those three Central American nations, proposing that the lack of governing capacity in each country is a crucial problem. This book argues that economic reforms can help the Northern Triangle countries escape their governance traps and identifies priority areas of economic reform. Sectors covered include fiscal policy, monetary and exchange rate policy, financial access and deterrence, and structural reforms. It also highlights the role that stakeholders like the United States can play to help in these reform efforts, and how those outcomes affect the United States and the global community. All told, Escaping the Governance Trap provides an accessible, direct account of the Northern Triangle’s economic challenges and how to fix them.

Neil Shenai served as the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Attaché to Mexico and Central America from 2016-2018. He is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Social Finance: Shadow Banking during the Global Financial Crisis (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.