At the request of the Managing Director of the IMF, a group of experts, chaired by Professor Richard Cooper of Harvard University prepared a report on the adequacy of quota formulas, including proposals for changes. The paper reviews the recommendations of the Quota Formula Review Group and...

Interpreting the role of expanding transport in overall production growth in the nineteenth century is still hampered by our lack of understanding of how much and when ocean shipping costs began to fall. This paper exploits new output and freight rate data for one of the world`s largest merchant...

This paper provides a historical look at how the multilateral trading system has coped with the challenge of shocks and shifts.  By shocks we mean sudden jolts to the world economy in the form of financial crises and deep recessions, or wars and political conflicts.  By shifts we mean...

This paper analyses GATT/WTO trade negotiations in an oligopolistic multi-country setting and identifies a new rationale for trade agreements.  When set unilaterally, tariffs are inefficiently high, both for familiar terms-of-trade reasons, but also to restrict market access of foreign firms. ...

This paper shows that the WTO's Article XXIV increases the likelihood of free trade, but may worsen world welfare when free trade is not reached and customs unions (CUs) form.  We consider a model of many countries.  Article XXIV prevents a CU from raising its common external tariff, which...

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the aggregate international demand schedule for emerging market (EM) securities as an asset class. The standard ‘push-pull’ model of capital flows is modified by reference to recent work on portfolio choice in the context...

There is an implicit consensus that 1930s exchange-rate regimes can be characterised as some variant of 'floating'.  This paper applies an adaptation of modern methodologies of exchange-rate regime classification to a panel of 47 countries in weekly observations between January 1919 and August...

This paper demonstrates how a currency board can become vulnerable to a crises in which the policymaker is forced to devalue. The model is built from two blocks: first, incomplete information about the devaluation cost faced by the policymaker; and second, unemployment persistence. Incomplete...

In this paper we modify the method of Blanchard and Quah (1989) in order to estimate a structural VAR model appropriate for a small open economy. In this way we identify shocks to output and prices in the members of the two monetary unions that make up the African CFA Franc Zone. The costs of...

This paper presents a principal-agent model of IMF conditional lending, in the aftermath of a capital-account liquidity crisis. We show that traditional ex-post conditionality can be effective in safeguarding the Funds resources, allowing for the provision of efficient emergency lending and...