As a territory of the United States, Puerto Rico enjoys the benefits of key U.S. legal, monetary, security, and tariff systems, and its residents are U.S. citizens. In the decades following World War II, Puerto Rico emerged as one of the world's fastest-growing economies. From 1950 to 1970 per capita income nearly doubled as a percentage of the U.S. average, making the island the richest economy in Latin America. Since the mid-1970s, however, labor force attachment has declined, economic growth has slowed, and the island's living standards have fallen further behind those on the mainland....

Persistently large external imbalances in the world economy contributed to the outbreak of the recent financial crisis. The current account imbalances were particularly severe among the economies that border on the Pacific--the United States ran large deficits, with offsetting surpluses in East Asia. The depth and breadth of the global recession also demonstrated the need for a coordination of national policies to achieve a sustained recovery.

While the magnitude of global-trade disruption led to some reduction in the size of the imbalances, closer examination suggests that the...